


Tomorrow on Every Turn

by intentioncraft



Series: Tomorrow on Every Turn [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Alcoholism, Brief homophobia, Canon character deaths, Child Abuse, DBBB 2015, Dean Centric, Depression, Friendship, Grief, Healing, M/M, Memories, Mild Sexual Content, Past Relationships, Recovery, Roommates, Slow Burn, Supernatural Elements, Trauma, Unhealthy Relationships, dysfunction, house fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-16
Updated: 2015-06-16
Packaged: 2018-04-04 06:04:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4127682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intentioncraft/pseuds/intentioncraft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean Winchester is regaining control of his life after years of instability and dysfunction between himself, his father, and his brother that all spawned from a childhood tragedy. In trying to find where he fits in after his father dies, he moves back Lawrence where it all began to correct his course. As summer turns to autumn and he chooses his friends and his future, Dean begins to understand that even lost memories will resonate, and that where your roots lie is not always where you’re meant to stay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue (May 2012)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to Melanie ([meldarlin](http://meldarlin.tumblr.com/), definitely go check out her art tag because she has _lots_ of great dean/benny stuff) for being so easy to work with, and so approachable and hardworking and, of course, for her adorable accompanying art ([viewable here](http://intentioncrafts.tumblr.com/post/121711094448/dbbb-2015-tomorrow-on-every-turn-story-by) and halfway through the fourth chapter). I don't know how it happened but when we discussed, I gave her no guidelines on what I wanted, and she managed to choose one of my personal fave moments. Also a big thank you and hip hip hooray to Deb (sharkarians) for working so hard to make DBBB 2015 happen. More thank yous to Amy (amonitrate) for her insightful beta work and extremely helpful commentary, to Ashley (inkywisps) for playing idea tennis waaay back when this fic was still a baby, and to Cammy (tulpadean) for helping me brainstorm a way to wrap up this fic and tie a whole bunch of things together. 
> 
> Don't ask me why this minibang is 25k. It was an accident.
> 
> <3

Sam cries at the funeral, his fresh tears run with the rain in a sticky mess down his cheeks and his large shoulders quake as though he were a child again. Something about that gets to Dean; it bores through the drizzle and the static blanketing his mind, drenching him to his skin, and he puts his arm around his younger brother and says, _It’s all right, Sammy_.

A guy in black extols on John Winchester’s virtues and as Dean holds his brother and fights back tears himself, all he can do is wonder who gave him a list. It certainly wasn’t himself or Sam and it couldn’t have been Ellen because the last time Ellen saw John she was throwing him out and screaming at him to never come back, never show his face in her bar again. Bobby, maybe? Then again, John and Bobby haven’t been on good terms since Dean was a teenager.

Maybe they just have a bank of generic things to say at the funerals of men who die and won’t be missed. Yeah, he decides. That’s gotta be it.

The voice of the priest touches on John’s devotion to his children and his dedication to raising them as happy as possible after the tragic death of his beloved wife, Mary. The iron taste of blood claws at the back of Dean’s throat, the inside of his cheek raw from chewing, teeth aching from suppressing a chatter that vibrates around his skull instead. It’s only been a few hours since his last drink, but he’s laying his father to rest today and it grates him to his nerves in no time at all. The arm around Sam starts to tense up, starts to tighten, as Dean does what he can to control the shakes.

Sam notices, though. And he shoots Dean a caustic sidelong glance, so Dean lets go of him. His hands hang between them, knuckles brushing the fabric of Sam’s jacket.

After the ceremony, if that’s the right word for what Dean just witnessed, the rain lets up but fresh mud squelches beneath the soles of the worn black shoes that he borrowed from Bobby as they walk back to the funeral home. His father’s remains are behind him at the bottom of a pit that he’s not going to claw his way out of. Not this time.

The two of them shuffle into the reception area, a small table of finger foods and coffee set up at the back, towards which the dozen or so mourners who showed up migrate. Sam keeps his head ducked, sniffs and talks nervously through still chattering teeth, something about Texas, something about dropping out of school, something about a woman he met a while ago, something about how things are going to be different without John. He says no more and no less about their dead father but leaves a howling, gaping blank for Dean to fill in. Out of the two of them, or anybody for that matter, Dean knew John better in his final years; it’s on him to say something, anything, about the man they just buried, to explain how the world will be different without John Winchester, why things should not have ended for him the way they did.

He can’t think of a single reason why.

Dean looks away from his brother’s glazed, reddened stare and taps a finger against his hip inside his pocket as he tells Sam to go get some of those sandwich rolls before they’re all gone.

Stepping around a corner on the way to the restrooms, he pulls a flask from his rented jacket and wonders if things will change at all.


	2. July

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: descriptions of a house fire and a near-relapse.

The Winchester home remained empty for three decades after Mary’s funeral, but John never sold it. No matter how low he sunk, John held onto this. Two storeys, three bedrooms, and one and a half bathrooms, poised in Lawrence for thirty years untouched and frozen to that night while the neighbourhood around it grew and flourished and changed.

That makes something in Dean’s heart open up, something with teeth.

He leans his elbows over the roof of his Chevy and stares at his hands, clasped together as if in prayer, with the house a blue-white blur over his knuckles. His father, no matter how close he wandered to the proverbial brink of disaster, no matter how far he was lost to the darkness, the evil that plagued him, did not mean for things to end up the way they did. Not that he ever mentioned going back and returning to life as scripted, and not that he didn’t threaten to eject his sons for wanting to return to life, or in Sam’s case, _begin_ life, sooner than himself, but here was firm proof that going home was always the intent.

Still, the darkness swallowed him and he forgot.

Dean isn’t sure he ever forgot, not completely. He may have buried it all under thick layers of denial, dissociation, but in trying to be more honest with himself he has to admit that the crackling flames and smell of smoke are what chased him back home.

A woman named Missouri Moseley, who claims to be a family friend although Dean doesn’t remember her, held onto an extra set of keys. Dean struggles to imagine what she might have looked like thirty years ago, softens her wrinkles, straightens her gait. It was the eighties, so maybe she had longer, larger hair. But he’s pulling a blank as she pats his shoulder in her small living room, full smell of baking and some kind of incense parching his throat, and coos in a soft voice how nice it is to see him after all these years, how handsome he grew up. Dean simply nods and lets her imagine him the way she wants to, but he senses something else in the way she pulls her plump mouth into a smile, something that says she knows more than he tells anyway.

In spite of what she may or may not suspect, Missouri presses the key into his hand. It’s heavy and burning hot as if she’s been hanging onto it tightly for the past three decades. Before he leaves her home, she gives his hand a squeeze and tells him not to be a stranger.

And that’s the kernel of it, of what Dean’s feeling as he stares across the street at his childhood home. He recognizes the shapes of things, vaguely tangible architecture like he’s traced the lines before in dreams. The tree in the yard stands out in particular, but only because he found a photograph of his family in John’s things after he died. The house just looks like any other house but with none of the soothing familiarity and comfort of Bobby’s house, or his car, or even any of the infinitely identical motel rooms across the country.

But the house isn’t strange at all. He is.

 _This is your home_ , he says to himself, now in the middle of the goddamn sidewalk watching the curtains in the front window like he expects someone to pull them to the side, peek through and tell him to fuck off, or they’ll call the police. _You lived here for four years_.

Four years out of thirty-four, though, isn't exactly solidifying. Layers of dark, corroded memories separate Dean and the flashes of happiness from that childhood. He recalls some things only because he repeats them to himself, like a mantra that's nearly lost meaning but for the sound it makes in his mouth, hollow echoes.

Dean’s eyes travel to the second storey window on the east side, this window slightly different from all the rest, a renovated quirk.

The only thing he remembers with any sureness happening in this house is his mother dying in it.

The key sinks into his pocket and jingles into a pile of loose change. The volume knob on his console cranked to the right, that second storey window stares at his back end as he drives away.

—

Growing up, John raised Sam and Dean to be anchored to one thing only: himself. The brothers were allies in a hidden war, but they ultimately had vastly different ideas about themselves and each other and where Dean became deferential and worn down by John, Sam turned rebellious through his teenage years and finally broke off from the unit when he turned eighteen. Dean still remembers how Sam placed a nervously handled acceptance letter to a school in California on a diner table, right through a splash of coffee. John’s face turned the colour of raw meat.

It was one of the worst fights they’d ever had and Sam left that night, bags already packed and ready right under their noses. Dean tried to call him several times a day for weeks, and then once a day for months. For a while, he thought that Sam had perhaps changed his number and that some stranger was getting all his desperate, whiny, occasionally very, very drunk voicemails.

But more than a year ago, John Winchester finally died of a massive heart attack in the middle of the night and Dean called Sam and left a singular, crushing voice message and waited for his brother to finally call him back. It was their first communication since Sam abandoned them for school.

John left his two adult sons virtually nothing except for a pickup truck that neither of them wanted because it was an obnoxiously loud gas guzzler, and a house that neither of them knew what to do with, so they let it sit, fester, unbothered and untended. They saw no use for it, but also saw no immediacy to handle that particular affair. Sam was content — or was at least _satisfied_ — to stay in Texas living out of motels with his new girlfriend Amelia, school forgotten at some point along the way, while Dean continued life the only way he knew how by that point: in the shadow of his father.

Something stuck, however, after the funeral; It was the fact that he couldn’t articulate how things could have or should have turned out differently for his father that irritated him. The anger that boiled in Sam when they were kids simmered at the back of Dean’s mind on low and the resentment towards his father for all the paranoia, all the fear injected into their lives for _nothing_ coiled around Dean’s own devotion to John like a boa constrictor, squeezing all the air out of it, out of _him_ at times.

Two months ago, just before the anniversary of his father’s death, he stopped drinking. Alcohol was, after all, the sourest reminder of his father and the thread that tied John and Dean together, but it didn’t come on Dean like a bolt of lightning. The decision to get sober wasn’t an epiphany, but a slow, gradual shift. It was tectonic plates below the crust, sliding by tenths of an inch over time until: earthquake. He packed up his things, left the place he and his father had been living in Sioux Falls near Bobby's junk yard, and made his way to the black hole centre of calamity.

Lawrence, Dean decided, is where he would have to go. The old house half-belonged to him, so it was his right by law to be able to move in, resume life, reboot at the age of thirty-four.

Missouri calls him after a few days and asks how things are going. When she asks specifically if he’s settling in, Dean puts up some bull shit front even though he can _hear_ the sad, knowing smile in her silence, and explains to her anyway that he’s moved into an apartment close by instead. He tells her it’s only temporary, reminds himself that he has a goal, here, at the same time, and she says, “Of course, dear” and then “call if you need anything.”

He looks for a roommate to bring down the added cost of rent. The ad goes out and he gets a couple call fairly soon, schedules interviews and puts it at the back of his mind. He has other things to address before the counter ticking towards zero in him arrives at the next disaster.

Summer beats down on the street in front of his apartment building, the metal buttons on the payphone hot to the touch and the receiver burning against his ear. He looks up a few therapists in town in the warped, fading pages of the local phone book, but his fingers hover over the call button for agonizing minutes, finally slamming down on it while his breathing speeds up, his vision narrowing. A secretary chirps,“Hello, You’ve reached Dr. Barnes’ office, how may I help you?” and his voice leaves him, tongue is pinned to the floor of his mouth by the dread crawling out of his throat, the hair on the back of his neck raises.

A cold ghost hovers close to his ear and slurs soothingly, _what’s wrong, kiddo? Tell me what’s wrong, son,_ and then it turns a sharp corner, vicious and clumsy, _just fucking talk, Dean. It won’t kill you to talk_.

“Sorry, wrong number,” he mutters, his voice dragged from him like he’s a hundred.

He looks up the location and times of local substance addiction recovery groups instead.

—

Air conditioning tugs at the tasselled banners that hang from the ceiling of the community centre, a relief from the suffocating humidity outside. A dead bingo board with ripped wires hanging from it like entrails sticks to the far wall beside a clock that runs about nine minutes behind.

The bright fluorescents tire Dean out before he even make it across the long hall to the milling crowd of folding metal chairs. _Just a support group. You don’t say a word_ , he forces himself to remember for the thirtieth time since starting up his car and driving down here for the seven o’clock meetup. It’s not in a church, something that Dean specifically avoided, and it’s small. Only seven or eight people so far. Just as he spies a chair closer to the edge of the group, an older black man intercepts him. He’s got a strong, skeptical brow and a broom-like moustache. And, he’s wearing a thick wool sweater in July.

“Ain’t seen you before. New to town?”

Dean possibly murmurs “yes”, but the way the man gives him the wild, reckless grin says otherwise.

“Strong, brooding, silent type? Hey, that’s alright, too,” the man says. His voice lazy and relaxed, “Name’s Rufus. I sorta run this thing here. Don’t call it _my_ group, I don’t like that, but I did start it a few years ago,” Rufus’ fingers smooth over his moustache, “Rules are: you can sit anywhere because this ain’t high school. We’re anonymous outside of this, just like AA. No rules about not being friends, though,” he waves a large hand jerkily at the group. Some of the attendees appear to know one another quite well, the way they laugh and make small talk and smile at each other, “And, of course, don’t be an asshole.”

Dean nods stiffly, takes a seat that’s close to the edge of the group with a seat between him and a woman around his age, perhaps slightly younger, with long sandy brown hair. She holds her small black purse in her lap with her legs folded primly to the side, eyes are fixed on the wall with the slow clock. Dean gathers she must be new as well.

The meeting itself is not that different from ones Dean’s been to before except Rufus is more starkly, brutally blunt than any speaker Dean’s encountered. He laughs a lot, laughs at things that don’t seem funny to Dean but he can see how it works for Rufus. The group is amiable towards Rufus, a companionable respect and friendliness that’s filtered through shared humiliation and shame, Dean supposes. Still, it’s difficult to put all his attention into Rufus’ words, to really let the stories hook him, to try and find common threads.

His foot starts to bounce on the floor, sweat making his hands slippery as he wrings them together. It happened when he saw the shrink back in Illinois, too, and he doesn’t get why because these are two very different situations. Dr. Visyak was all around excellent listener, but for some reason, the longer she focused on certain things like Dean’s father and Dean’s childhood, the less he had to say in reply. The less he found he _could_ say in reply. It took just under three sessions for Dean to figure out what she was getting at about John, and then he stopped going altogether.

Here, though. Rufus is not about that at all. Rufus is up there advertising his fuck ups in searing detail, making a joke out of his life. He pauses to take sips of water from a styrofoam cup but never stops for someone to jump in and tell him, “Well, maybe it wasn’t _all_ your fault.”

And still, Dean can hear John’s voice in the back of his mind, cruel and stern, berating this man for dissecting himself in front of the group like this. _No self-respect, no sense of dignity. You have to show it before you can earn it, Dean_.

The meeting ends after an eternity with a scrape, shuffle of cheap chairs but Dean sits frozen to his seat for a long time, afraid to move, afraid to get into his car and drive home past a bar, the corner store. The woman beside him gets up and leaves quickly as though chased by rabid dogs. He watches after her, innately curious and worried about her, until he feels someone close by him and turns to see the old man again – Rufus .

He asks Dean if it’s at all what he expected, and somehow, after watching the brown-haired woman flee the room his voice is ready to work this time.

“I’ve been to these before,” Dean says.

Rufus snuffs a laugh, “Really? Coulda sworn by the way you were sittin’ here like a scared cat that it was your first time,” he says, and adds, a little less sharp, “It gets less scary. This part, at least. Everything else is a stain that won’t come out as easy, but you can try.”

Dean can’t help it, now that he’s figured out how to talk again, and his father’s sentiments come rolling out of him like bile, “What the hell makes you think I’ll be back?”

Rufus isn’t bothered by Dean’s hard tone, and he simply grins wide at him, and says nothing as he nods his head at Dean’s hands. They’ve finally stopped shaking, stopped feeling cold.

—

His apartment is within walking distance of the community centre, but he drives anyway for the grace of AC in his old car and to make people think he lives further away. The sun is an orange wash on the sidewalk when he enters the building and marches up the two flights of stairs to his apartment, and Dean’s dully alarmed when he reaches his door, key ready, and sees light spilling from beneath the door, TV noise muffled through the laminate.

As of earlier that day, he has a roommate and in the last couple hours he managed to push that specific worry from his mind. It wasn’t the best timing, but after Benny Lafitte moved in, Dean announced right away that he was going out for a while and gave Benny no details more than that. But coming home, he feels like there’s a sandwich board attached to his front announcing where he’s just been.

Benny offers him a simple “hi”as he walks in and that’s that. Dean stands by the door for fifteen seconds and watches him tap the remote with a thick finger, previous channel button. Commercials on one, Emeril shouting over sizzling vegetables on the other. Benny sits forward on the couch cushion, perched on the edge like he’s simply a guest in Dean’s home.

After speaking to Rufus for a half-hour in the emptying bingo hall, Benny’s non-attention is both welcome and unnerving.

He asks if Benny’s settling in all right with a rehearsed line, and Benny replies in the affirmative in a voice that’s more breath than substance. He has a gentle way of speaking, words floating on the air like wind pulling at bullrushes, swampy and warm, that stuck out when Dean met him the other day to discuss the living arrangement. Benny was one of two candidates, the other being a squirrely looking guy in baggy pants who smelled like old weed and McDonald’s french fries. Andy seemed like a friendly guy, but when he mentioned weekly “Drunk D&D” with friends, Dean sighed and passed him over for someone who looked like he had no friends at all.

“Hey, you okay?”

It’s possible Dean is staring, “What?”

“You look sick.”

Dean swallows the lump in his throat. His hands feel weak again, but he waves one anyways, hoping it doesn’t shake too much, “Nah, just tired,” he replies, and that’s not a lie. He’s exhausted. Rufus didn’t push him to tell more than he wanted to, but there’s an unusual fear that goes with baring your insecurities to another person, like lancing decades old injuries, afraid of what might come out. His phone is heavier in his pocket with Rufus’ home number weighing him down like a pile of stones.

“Call anytime if you need a friendly reminder, kid,” Rufus had said.

Benny eyes him suspiciously, his icy blue stare narrow and focused but he nods slowly. It’s okay; Dean probably _does_ look like shit and if their places were reversed, he would be asking what’s going on as well.

They consider each other in silence for a long moment and then Dean finally breaks the stillness and starts toward the kitchen, “Hungry? I was just gonna make some spaghetti. Nothin’ fancy. No meatballs. No garlic bread,” he does a mental checklist, frowns, and then opens the cupboard, “Actually, it’s just going to be macaroni and meat sauce because I’m out of spaghetti, too.”

Benny laughs, a nice light sound that lifts some of the weight off Dean’s chest.

“Sound delicious, but I’m good, thanks. Already ate,” Benny replies, throwing Dean an uneasy smile, eyes crinkling but never quite lighting up. When Dean asked earlier what made Benny, an out-of-towner, want to move to Lawrence, he gave Dean that same smile, that same guarded expression. It makes Dean think about something Rufus said about having secrets scratching at the inside that want to come out.

Maybe he’s not the only one keeping secrets.

Benny gets up from the couch with a grunt, “Think I’ll turn in for the night. I’ll just uh—”

He gives Dean a polite nod.

“I’m much obliged to you for letting me stay here with you, Dean,” he says, leaving Dean somewhat flabbergasted as he passes by, shoulders hunched under a thick blue coat which he hasn’t taken off even though it’s summer and the apartment air conditioning isn’t spectacular. He ducks into his bedroom down the hall and Dean waits until he hears the door close.

Benny’s strange. He knew it from the second he shook Dean’s hand, something odd and careful in his cool grip, like he’s waiting for bad news, a revelation to quake him out of his level demeanour. But there’s an innate steadiness in the old fashioned lilt to his speech, the way he seems to carry a salty breeze with him like he’s just gotten off a boat. Dean really likes his hands and his voice and the way he called Dean _chief_ not fifteen minutes after they carried Benny’s meagre belongings, which included an old looking trunk, a box full of books, and a mini-fridge, up the stairs.

Not that any of it matters _that_ much.

He offsets rent. He’s easy company, and he doesn’t appear to be a criminal or a creep and Dean’s got other things to worry about other than his slightly old-timey roommate. Like how he’s going to make it over this hump in his recovery, how he’s going to make it through the next couple weeks now that he’s stirred up the nest of snakes in his belly.

His hands shake when he twists the knob on the stove to boil a pot of water.

—

Dean learned first-aid with Sam when they were only nine and five years old. John slapped old army manuals into their hands that detailed how to treat anything from nosebleeds to bullet wounds, words like _cardiopulmonary_ and _hypothermia_ tripping around their mouths as they parroted them back to one another. Dean didn’t use half of what he learned, and much of what he did use was not sanctioned by the book but by his father. Whiskey poured over cuts, sterilizing sewing needles with a lighter, setting bones and resetting dislocated shoulders and never going near an actual emergency room except for the time Sam broke his arm and John wasn’t around to tell him what to do. For all his fruitless wandering and investigating over the twenty or so years John was able to, he got into enough bar brawls that Dean and Sam both had enough first hand experience with injuries to impress a small town emergency clinic.

But it was important for him to know these things and to do a damn good job of it. And now, five years after he’d last attempted to strike out on his own only to come back to find John with a pussing knife wound on his hand, it’s still important. Because Dean knows that untreated wounds infect. They get contaminated by the outside, by dirty and circumstance and consequence, they rot on the inside and blight the body, ugly and poisoned. Pressure builds, constricts, swells and grows red and purple and green and yellow. The ache, the pulse, reaches deep into the blood, right into the cells and the energy that sustains life, and makes everything sluggish, sick, old, and ruined.

Dean considers the house he inherited one half of, the home he has full permission to move into whenever he pleases, and wonders what it will take to release the infection that's been aching in him for so damn long. He wonders what it will take to flush out the nightmares, the fear, the imminent danger closing in on him from all sides, and free him from the sickness that took his father and his family. Should he gut the entire place? Tear down the walls and start from scratch? Rebuild, repaint, refinish everything until it smells and looks new and unlived. Would that erase the memories that leak poison into every corner of his life?

Even if he had the money to do that, to get the the smell of smoke out of the walls completely by destroying the walls themselves, he’s not sure he’d get the memory of the smell out of his head.

Up the old stairs, he leaves footprints in the thick layer of dust like a hunted animal in snowy woods. The exterior of the house was well-kept, someone coming to trim the lawn every few weeks, Missouri said her kid nephew did it for a few bucks. The siding could use a few coats of paint to heal the chips and dings from simple weathering but that won’t take Dean very long, and Missouri offers once again the help of her nephew. But she takes in the unkempt home on the inside and for a moment an expression falls on her face like she's sorry she couldn’t take care of this, too, like it was all her responsibility to make sure this home remained liveable for an indefinite period of time, but she corrects her expression and smiles softly in Dean’s direction.

"Boy, I hope you know how to use a vacuum," she smiles at Dean after the two of them sit down to store bought coffee in the kitchen. Around him, a mess of unplugged retro appliances lie like unearthed artifacts. He asks if she has a vacuum he can borrow for a while and she chuckles gently.

Missouri stays on the main floor when Dean goes up, says something about giving him some time alone with his thoughts and Dean wants to ask her why, what for, but then he's standing in the doorjamb of Sam's old nursery — not even Sam's nursery at all since it had to be rebuilt after the fire — and waits for something, maybe a ghost, to cross his path.

When he puts his cheek up against the wall, the smell is there the exact same as the night it happened. Smoke, burning. Hot, wicked air and his father’s voice shouting at him to _go, go now, take your brother and get out of here_ , a chant etched into his mind before he'd even memorized the whole alphabet or learned to count past ten. His brother was crying, a thin, panicky noise that he’d never heard him make before, chubby little arms flailing and grabbing at Dean’s pajamas hard enough to restrict Dean’s own breathing. The rest of the house is a blur and the next thing Dean remembers is cold grass beneath his bare toes and lights flashing, scorching heat at his back.

He looked up at the window of Sam’s bedroom, the baby getting heavier and heavier as the adrenaline blitzed through his small body, expended, and he knew then that he was alone. He saw orange and yellow and black, and felt suddenly abandoned by everyone, by his mother, by his father. When John finally scooped them both up and carried them across the street to the flashing lights, he didn’t cry. And even leaning into John’s side wrapped in a thick, grey blanket, still voiceless, he felt nothing but loneliness.

—

He takes stock of the other rooms a little bit faster, all of them refinished for smoke damage. Bare walls, white, bland, like no family lived here at all. The memory of the Winchesters as they were painted over and left to dust for thirty years. His father did this, he recalls. The last thing John did before moving his family out was bury every memory this place ever contained, good and bad.

Missouri is sitting on a covered sofa downstairs, one of the only pieces of furniture left in the room, holes in the walls where pictures used to hang, and she makes a pitying face when Dean walks down the stairs.

"You know, people 'round this neighbourhood say this house is haunted."

Before they came inside, some kids playing on the street watched their every move, a tangible feeling of dread in the way they turned to each other and mouthed something that looked like _holy shit_. Dean ignored their gaze, focused on calming his own mind and body. The material of his shirt was suddenly too tight, too thick, sweat underneath.

"Is it?"

Missouri adjusts herself where she sits and tilts her head to the side. Large silver earrings hang like chimes and snag on the collar of her pale pink sweater.

“Your daddy came to me after the fire,” Missouri says after Dean takes a seat next to her. The plastic squeaks under his jeans and he doesn’t lean back, just sits with his elbows on his knees and stares across at an empty socket on the wall, “I’m sorry to say, Dean, but the day he packed you boys up and left...I still regret it. That shouldn’t’ve happened,” she says, voice soft and thin, “I should’ve done something more for you boys. John, though, you know how stubborn he was.”

Dean’s mouth twitches up in a brittle smirk.

Missouri smiles, “I used to do palm readings back then, you know. Make a little extra on the side for my own family. I read some books, some occult and some more about the way people think. I taught myself how to _read_ people, really learn them. John asked me – few days after the fire – to come to your house and see if I could _feel_ anything,” she says meaningfully. Dean realizes far too late that this is a confession, that Missouri carries a guilt with her that isn’t hers to bear, “Usually, I just figured out myself what a person wanted to hear and that was the story I told. But…I’m not sure what John wanted to hear.”

Dean finds his voice, curious and fragile, like his first words after the fire, “What did you tell him?”

Missouri shrugs her shoulders. She has sad eyes, Dean thinks, and not just because she's telling a sad story. Large, brown, full of heaviness. _She shouldn’t be this sad_ , Dean thinks. People tell stories all the time. Some lives are even built on things that are not true or only vaguely recalled, and they either adapt to the lies and harden themselves, or they soak it up, like a sponge, and leave trails wherever they go, saturate themselves with misused, misremembered history.

Truth, however, is finicky. Like looking at something underwater from above, wrinkled and bent by light and perspective. Constantly moving as if it’s some living thing that breathes and grows and eventually dies.

“I told him that I felt nothing,” Missouri sighs, finally, and shakes her head.

Dean nods, understanding but unsure of the sound that's caught in his throat.

—

His chest hits the rim of the bathtub, the biggest target for him to throw up into after waking, sweating, numb, and violently nauseous, from his fourth nightmare this week. His senses jump back and forth between struggling to remember and begging to forget, only the phantom heat crawling down his neck and the feeling of being choked makes him certain of what he'd been dreaming about.

It’s six days since he visited the house with Missouri, the stink of smoke burned inside of his nostrils and the stirred memories making him sick and irritable for the entire week. He hasn’t relapsed, thank fuck, but his throat is dry and a headache rings in his ear drums His hands ache from the shaking and no matter how many times he attempts _deep breathing_ like that yoga instructor back in Indiana once taught him after he freaked out in her bedroom after waking up from a similar dream, he can’t stop feeling like there’s a hand forcing all the air out of his lungs.

Rufus told him that it never gets easier. He’s at fourteen years, he told Dean when Dean called him on Monday, and it never goes away. It always lurks, there are always urges, sometimes triggered, sometimes not. To Dean, that seems impossible and unfair, because time erased almost everything else, taken almost everything he has, why can't it take this as well?

Spit bitter and dripping down his chin, Dean sloshes water around the tub to wash away the mess. The shower curtain will need to be cleaned, but hopefully he can avoid having to explain to Benny why. His roommate, as far as he can tell, suspects nothing but the flu. He asked Dean after a few days if he needed to go to the hospital and Dean snapped at him that he was fine.

Still shivering and not sure if he’s going for another round, Dean sits on his ass, leans against the hard side of the bathtub, the cold seeping through his soaked shirt, and dries his hands on his grey sweatpants. He flips the toilet seat open just in case, teeth chattering painfully.

The next thing he sees is a large shape against the door frame, a slow reaction as he blinks through the uncomfortable sleep creeping over him, focuses on the tall glass of water and an ugly brown blanket that Dean doesn’t recognize over Benny’s arm.

His hands clench painfully into fists at his sides, “Don’t do that,” Dean grouches, teeth slimy and gums sour.

“Like you’d have taken me out, huh?” Benny saunters across their tiny shared bathroom and crouches down next to Dean to give him the glass, joints creaking like a tree in winter. Dean can’t be sure since his own skin feels so hot and fevered, but he swears there’s a cool breeze rolling off Benny. Between the sweating and the shivering, he wants to push him away and wrap himself around him all in one confused thought.

Dean raises the glass to his lips and takes a small sip of it, just enough to swirl it around his mouth and then spit into the toilet. When he’s done, he trades the glass for the blanket and with Benny’s help tugs it around himself like a cocoon. Then Benny hands the glass back.

“You didn’t have to do this,” Dean says after Benny stands up again to give Dean some breathing room.

“You’re having a rough week. Just thought I’d help.”

Dean makes a low noise, protest rising in his chest as he leans forward, eyes trained on Benny’s blue carpet slippers, wondering vaguely what his feet look like. It seems weird enough that Benny has ankles, since he hasn't seen him wearing anything but full pants and long-sleeved shirts and that ridiculously heavy coat. But there they are, ghostly white with coarse, dark hair, the worn lines of his heel tucked into his slippers.

Closing his eyes, Dean takes a steadying breath, drinking in an unfamiliar smell that clings to the blanket around his shoulders. He doesn’t know how much longer he’d be able to keep this up, the nausea and the nightmares and the ever-present feeling that everything is about to crumble, turn to ash in his hands. There’s nothing to drink in the apartment. Dean isn’t sure if Benny’s noticed that,because he hasn’t asked. People notice that kind of thing, right?

Dean has no idea.

“I’ll be fine,” he says at last.

He feels Benny smile at him. _Feels_ it. Every inch of him is that much more sensitive without any alcohol to dull the world, wash out the light and colours and sounds, and all the hidden senses of being watched, being observed. It raises a tingle low in his belly, warm but sharp, and raises a flush under his t-shirt that doesn’t quite make it to his face.   

“I believe it,” Benny asks, “You need anything else, boss?”

“No,” Dean replies, and then looks down at the glass of water, the surface vibrating from the shaking in his hands. It's just a stupid glass of water, but the past week Benny has done so much more than Dean could ever ask of anybody, but “Listen…thanks,” is all he can manage.

“Don’t even mention it.”

“Sorry for being such a dick lately.”

Benny chuckles, “Haven’t noticed a thing, to be honest.”

Dean closes his eyes. He can’t be certain, but he feels like the roommate from Hell, sometimes. It’s been a few weeks and Benny spends a lot of time closed up in his room and he still hasn’t put a single thing in the fridge, which Dean finds weird but when he mentioned that Benny was _allowed_ to use up his space, Benny reminded him of the mini-fridge in his room.

Dean must be giving off a vibe, “Well, then. Sorry for being a dick always.”

He eventually shoos Benny away and trudges back to his room, flops into his bed thinking about nothing, not fire, not the house, not the loneliness he felt slam into him when he stood silent on the top floor of his childhood home. Nothing but the texture of wool on his bare arms, wrapped up in the thick blanket that smells like wind, crisp rain and something sweet, and before he falls asleep he wonders, half dreaming already, if that's how Benny tastes, too.


	3. August

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: This chapter contains mentions of underage drinking and drug use, brief homophobia, and an unhealthy sexual relationship from Dean's past.

July tapers into August, hot and thick with storms that surround Lawrence on all sides with destruction. Tornado warnings, which happen far more regularly than Dean ever imagined, leave him feeling claustrophobic and antsy, but it gives him something to learn about and draw distraction from as his three month anniversary passes with the barest, fearful acknowledgement. July had been impossibly more difficult than the two months that came before, and when he tells Rufus about it the old man just gives him a sly _told you so_ face, but he follows it up with an old battered three-month chip out of his pocket — his own from so many years ago — and flips it into Dean’s hand.

“Why me?”

Rufus shrugs, “Milestones, kid. Don’t ignore them.”

Dean throws it into his night table with the key to the house and a few other relics, photographs, rings, a necklace with some bizarre brass talisman that Sam gave him when they were kids that Dean stopped wearing years ago when Sam ran off to school. Stuff that weighs. Rufus means well, he must since it’s his own three-month chip that he’s handing down to Dean, but with how close Dean came to collapsing the week before, how he wouldn’t have made it through on his own, he isn’t so sure he deserves the commemoration.

With sobriety, however, Dean finds that he finally has the energy to allocate parts of his life to other things, hobbies that he’d forgotten, interests that suddenly seem interesting again. He visits the local library and in addition to a few books about extreme weather, he starts taking out piles of science fiction novels. He picks up a job at a small, cluttered repair shop run by a grouchy old tinkerer named Frank Devereaux. It’s not going to make him rich, but it pays the rent and groceries and even allows Dean to start building up some small savings.

For what, he’s not entirely sure yet. The prospect of a future sends him into a panic. He tries not to think about it.

But, for now, he gets to spends his days fixing up broken radios and old record players, something that he used to do as a teenager all the time, since the only thing they could ever afford were used, malfunctioning appliances and gadgets that needed major repairing before they could be of any use, but gradually had forgotten he enjoyed in the years after Sam left and he had to devote all his energy to looking after his father. The task is sometimes challenging, but it settles him, replacing a few parts, dismantling lost causes, and sending things on their way.

Plus, he also gets to listen to Frank go on outrageous tirades about the government, the moon landing, alien bases in New Mexico, ketchup, Wal-mart, and lapdogs.

After a couple more weekly meetings with Rufus’ group, he finally catches the woman with the brown hair on her way out. Rather, he’s incredibly late to a meeting one Thursday evening and bumps into her in the foyer of the bingo hall. Her eyes are wild and red and he sees this for what it is, knows that face because he’s seen it in the mirror a hundred times.

They sit on the steps of the hall while the meeting continues inside, the buzzing of the cicadas muffled by the humidity, and Dean gets to know Bela Talbot. She keeps a good two feet between them at all times with her arms folded over her legs as she clicks her high-heeled foot on the stone steps of the hall. She steals restless glances at him, sizing him up. Dean reads her body language and knows better than to ask her if she needs a lift home.

But, before she climbs into the cab he calls for her, he adds another number to his contacts list. He isn’t sure if it’s real until she calls him almost a week later and asks if he’d like to go for coffee. Rufus raises his dark, fuzzy eyebrows when he catches the two of them entering together one week with matching paper cups in hand.

“Ain’t you just two peas,” he remarks afterwards while Dean stacks chairs, winking at him. Dean colours. Bela is standing there as well, tapping something on her phone, and says something harsh to Rufus in that snooty accent of hers that makes him laugh like an old dog barking, but Dean doesn’t hear either end of the conversation; he’s caught up in what this means, what it all signifies.

He has friends. He’s building a circle, setting down roots. It's like he’s living someone else’s life, and he isn’t sure how he feels about that.

—

The house hangs like a miserable cloud over everything.

Dean works on it dutifully, cleaning up the yard after every storm that tears through town, patching up the exterior where age and nature and vandalism have left parts peeling and worn. He repaints the porch, and then that looks strange to him so he repaints the rest of the trim, earning himself an aching back and a sunburn that practically glows in the dark and leaves him wincing for a week. He visits a handful of times, sometimes with Missouri and sometimes alone, but the door stays shut. He hasn't stepped foot inside since the first time he went with Missouri, although he knows he needs to eventually fix up the interior as well.

Whenever he imagines how he would like the kitchen to look after he’s done, all he can picture is his mother in a blue polka-dotted apron, talking on the phone with someone, his dad. Weary sadness etches into her face as she bites her lip, hangs up, and sighs. Mary puts her hands on her hips and goes back to spreading jam over the sandwich she’s making for Dean.

For some reason, that scene plays in his nightmares almost as much as the fire itself, some kind of odd contrast, ordinary versus horrific that wakes Dean quietly and he lies awake in bed, clinging to the sound of his mother’s voice, instead of running to the bathroom.

“Whatcha workin’ on over there?”

Dean jumps. The pen he’s holding goes flying.

“It’s – uh –” He leans over and picks up the pen. He's poring over paint swatches and countertop samples, knowing that it'll be a long time before he can afford either but it makes him _feel_ productive. Benny’s watching him from the back of the couch with an amused expression, but he doesn't tease even though Dean gives him plenty of time, “A house. Here. In Lawrence. My dad owned it and then he died without a will so my brother and I both got a part of it and I guess I'm trying to – uh – make it livable again.”

“You got a brother? Older or younger?”

Dean flushes slightly. They don't talk about family. In general, there’s a lot that they don’t know about each other, but they’re only roommates so it doesn’t matter. It’s not like Dean has happy things to say, and by how secretive Benny seems to be about _everything_ , Dean assumes there’s not a lot of happiness there, either.

Except, Benny's friendly curiosity pulls Dean out, makes him eager to share what he can, so he says, “Younger. His name’s Sam. He’s living out in Texas with this girl he met a little while ago, Amelia,” Dean explains casually, and for a frantic moment, he’s afraid Benny’s going to ask for more, what’s Sam like, what’s he do, why is it only Dean in Kansas dealing with their father’s home.

And Dean will have to lie because Benny doesn't deserve Dean's misery.

But, Benny doesn’t ask. He makes a noise of affirmation and continues whatever he’s doing there on the couch, a constant clicking noise. Dean cranes his neck and peers over the top of the sofa.

“You’re knitting?”

“I am,” Benny replies easily, not a hint of shame in his voice. His thick fingers wrap around two long metal needles as he dips them in and out, over, between and through soft grey loops of yarn. Dean watches, mesmerized, as a new row form in what Dean can only guess by its size and shape is a blanket.

His memory flips back a few weeks to the night when Benny brought him a blanket, and how it smelled, and how Dean hasn't yet returned it. His heart quickens in his chest.

Benny doesn’t say anything else for a few minutes, but the self-conscious silence tells Dean that he's aware of how Dean's watching him closely, silently judging, and Benny finally says, “I can’t tell if you’re staring because this is funny to you or if you’re trying to pick it up by sight.”

Dean colours and turns his gaze down his notepad, the little squares of colour, all pale blue and barely distinguishable from one another, and then decides, _fuck it_. The house will still be there another day if it’s waited for thirty goddamned years. Benny scooches over on the couch and takes his project with him when Dean comes to sit next to him, and then smirks mischievously.

“Relax. I’m not here to learn,” Dean grunts and snatches the remote off the coffee table. He has an entire season of Dr. Sexy PVR’d. He’s trying to get someone else to watch this show with him, and since Bela’s already declared it “asinine rubbish”, Benny might as well be his next candidate.

Benny works on his knitting in silence and Dean taps his finger against his temple, trying to force thoughts like _this is nice_ and _this is comfortable_ from his mind because he’s acting too much like he and Benny are married, when he and Benny aren’t even anything.

—

John Winchester knew a lot about his eldest son. In a way, he built Dean from the ground up after his first four years were burnt down. Created in his image, Dean felt his father’s absences like a vacuum or a black hole, pulled towards cataclysm without an anchor or a direction. Growing up, it seemed like a fair trade for a child; John made sure Dean had shelter and food and clothes, most of the time, and Dean was a willing and compliant participant in John’s obsessive quest for revenge, most of the time.

There were few things Dean kept from John, however. The extent of Sam’s confessed resentment, for one. Their family was a ladder, after all. Dean’s primary caretaker was John and Sam’s primary caretaker was Dean, and where John was there for Dean, Dean was there for Sam. Again, it seemed to make sense to spread the burden around, but for some reason Sam couldn’t understand how that worked. And when Sam was only eight, he reported John to family services anonymously, and they were forced to move to evade foster care.

It was months before Sam told Dean what he did, crying from fear and guilt of being found out by their father. Dean was stuck between fury at Sam and a confusion embedded deep in his mind that things were not the way they should be, not the way Sam wanted them to be. Sam didn’t think their family was good enough, and that stung. But as his crying continued, all it came down to was being tired of moving constantly, tired of having no permanent friends, tired of combat training, tired of feeling scared of the dark, tired of there being no results in their dad’s quest for vengeance against whatever killed their mom. And Dean couldn’t find it in himself to disagree, not as he held Sam and cried along with him. He promised that he would never tell John, ever.

He kept his word, and after that, Dean started to question the arrangements that John had devised for them. He began to categorize parts of his personality as _John_ and _Dean_ and soon enough, he was uncovering things about himself that both relieved him, because he _was_ his own person after all, and startled him, because, like what Sam phoned into family services, John could never find out.

When he was sixteen, he kissed a girl for the first time. Her name was Robin and Dean met her when he spent a few months in boy’s home for stealing food to keep himself and Sam fed. She came by a couple times a week to play guitar with some of the boys, and her interest in _Dean’s_ interests sparked an affection in him that burst through him like a renewed life for the few weeks after, before John came to collect him.

And when he was eighteen, he slept with a man for the first time. He was older than Dean by about fifteen years and had an intense, scruffy look that Dean found attractive. They had sex in a motel, Dean pinned to the mattress and the guy fucking into him fast and rough, breathing heavy onto Dean’s shoulder and moaning _it’s okay, it’s okay._ Once he came, he sat on the edge of the bed with his head down, lips moving in a quiet prayer, and after several weird weeks of this, Dean finally built up the courage to ask him a question.

“Of course demons are real. They are agents of impulse, lust, and depravity,” Cas explained, “They’re wicked and make us wicked, but we can ask for forgiveness. They can’t.”

It wasn’t the answer Dean had been looking for, so he lay on his side with the damp sheets draped over his ass and legs, a cheeky grin that earned him more than a few black eyes over the years, “So, when you pray, you’re actually apologizing for having sex with me?” Dean’s smile faltered, every inch of him suddenly felt grimy and he wanted to tear it all off, “That’s… _wow_.”

Dean left Illinois that night.  

In retrospect, it was all a bad idea. But Dean didn’t feel worthless or impure for who he slept with or how much he slept with them. Dean wasn’t religious. But, his father—also unreligious—spoke about men who sleep with other men, and that was enough for Dean to keep this secret to himself, even out of Sam’s reach, until he was nearly thirty. Being bisexual had never been something he feared about himself, only _for_ himself. But with John dead and Sam generally supportive of his identity, if a bit skeptical since he’s only ever seen Dean with women, he shouldn’t feel as cautious about _whom_ he finds himself attracted to.

And, while he’s never felt ashamed about being attracted to men, he is ashamed that he wants Benny, because Benny deserves far better than the likes of Dean, and him selfishly thinking about a future between them that probably won’t and can never exist. Benny, even though Dean’s only known him for a month, deserves more than the pervasive, permanent disappointment that Dean embodies with his entire self.

—

“So, if I might ask, why are you living here if there’s a perfectly good house with your name on half of it in town?” Bela asks him over lunch. She’s snoopy, and Dean isn’t sure how he feels about that, because Dean can’t even tell if Bela Talbot truly likes him, or if he’s just the only half-decent company she’s found in Lawrence. They sit together at meetings, a chair between them at all times, and even grab coffee together some afternoons since Bela lives close to where Dean works. They have just about nothing in common except for a never-ending supply of stories about shitty dads and a shared love of fashion. Bela can afford it, Dean can’t. She calls him “dear” and “sweetie” in her crisp English accent, but it’s nothing at all like when Missouri does it.

The paper straw wrapper in Dean’s hand is soaked with sweat. Lately, he’s been missing the manageable summer heat of Sioux Falls where he used to work on cars at Bobby’s junkyard. There, when it got too hot, he’d grab a beer and escape to the basement. Stacks of books kept him occupied while he cooled down, Bobby’s mutts constantly leaning their drooling muzzles on his legs propped up no matter how many times Dean shoved them off. As much as he doesn’t miss the drool, the teeth, the barking, he sometimes misses the dogs.

It’s disarming how little he thinks about Bobby himself.

“Because…” he takes a deep, steadying breath that doesn’t steady him at all. Bela is watching him with those clear, piercing eyes, mouth pursed. She’s wearing a sleeveless shirt with sunglasses on her head, her skin browning from the sun in a way that Dean’s never would, “I don’t exactly have happy memories there.”

“Oh,” Bela’s expression remains neutral, and she looks away, “Sorry I asked.”

Dean laughs, forces it to sound easy, “Bull shit,” he says.

Bela replies with a twist of her shaded lips.

“The long and short of it is my mom died there. I was four,” Dean explains somewhat cruelly, his voice pulled like an elastic band until sound barely makes it past his lips. People know about it. Rufus’ eyes softened when he’d learned Dean’s last name a few weeks ago. But Bela’s an out-of-towner so this is the first she’ll have heard of it, "My dad went off the deep end," not many people know exactly what John did, what he believed, because the secrecy he impressed on his sons was dangerous, a threat. Anybody could be involved in this hidden war, anybody could be possessed.

Something Sam said when they were teenagers, as they were cleaning guns and blessing water in motel bathtubs, comes back to Dean constantly.

_Have you ever even seen a ghost, Dean?_

That question sticks, like a mold that grows and chokes and kills. Sam gave him his answer, of course, but Dean held tightly to his, knowing that it could hobble their family, smash what was already disintegrating the older Sam and Dean got. Because in all the years Dean went chasing monsters and ghosts in the dark with his father, he can't say he saw a single one. Not for sure.

Dean smiles grimly at Bela, "He needed help. He didn't get it himself, and my brother and I were..." _not good enough_ , "We were too young to really understand any of it."

Bela’s not completely compassionless. She click her tongue in sympathy, “And you came back because…”

Dean shrugs, “Honestly, not sure. I thought that…I thought, well, my life is a mess for some reason, right? It had to go off the rails somewhere. And I figured…well, it must have gone off the rails here.”

“So it’s that easy? Just come back here and get back on the rails?”

“No,” Dean says simply, too fast for him to really consider another answer. Bela waits for him to elaborate. But now that it’s out there, Dean can immediately tell this was a bad idea all around, because all he can think about now is how there’s absolutely zero whiskey back home, at the apartment.

“I gotta…hang on,” he says through numb lips. Dean rakes his hand over his face, heat crawling up the back of his shirt and making him sweat and shake. The noise around him falls on his ears as if through thick, muffling walls. Only a handful of seconds has gone by but each one feels like an eternity fill with regret, despair, confusion, and desperation.

He’s worked so hard, so damn hard, to try and make things right, to fix this, and even now he still feels like it’s not getting him anywhere, not making anything better. Not just for himself, but for the people who have devoted far too much time dealing with him. He thinks about the dogs again. He hasn’t thought about Bobby in weeks. He hasn’t talked to Sam in over a year.

“Darling,” she says, her voice reminding Dean of a lacy doily, a crystal bowl of snakes sitting on top, but her hand is on his, cool and soft, “I know it’s not what you want to hear, but perhaps you’re focusing too hard on this one thing. Insisting things be a certain way when they’re clearly another will only make you sicker,” She says, and Dean suddenly feels a wave of hot guilt, knowing what he knows about Bela and what drove her to where she is now. What her own father did to her when she was a kid, and how many people it took to pretend like nothing was wrong.

“It’s not that simple,” he says, each word slow and hard.

“No, I suppose it isn’t,” she replies, “If it were, do you really think the two of us would be here together?”

—

It’s so hot out a week later that Dean can feel himself earning yet another sunburn overtop of his weak tan and freckles, but Rufus doesn’t seem to mind, as usual, and wears a long-sleeved shirt. His arms folded, tucked under his armpits, an envelope beside him on the park bench. It’s midday and the sound of families enjoying the good weather before the storms forecasted for the evening trickles throughout the park.

“What’s up, man?” Dean takes the other side of the bench, wincing when his bare arms hit the hot metal. Rufus called him at work, and Dean told Frank he was going out for lunch and might not be back in the afternoon, depending.

“My daughter,” Rufus starts in a rough voice, but Dean’s grateful to hear that he’s clear and crisp and sober, “wants me to meet my grandson.”

Dean exhales in relief. It’s far better news than he’d been expecting, “That's...that's great, man. Congratulations," he says, but Rufus’ expression remains still as he stares across the distance at the lawnmower puttering across the grass.

"Right?"

"He's five."

"Oh."

"Yep," Rufus drawls and clears his throat, "Startin' school in a couple months. And I didn't even know he even existed until this morning," he says with stale bitterness, then he chuckles grimly, "Funny thing is, I'm only mad at myself, know it's my own fault. You know that feeling you get when something goes wrong, as all you can think is, gee, wish I didn't do that thing that brought all this on? Imagine what it would be like if that didn't happen?"

"Yeah."

"Ever get that about your whole life?"

Dean barks a laugh, "Why do you think I'm here?"

Rufus shakes his head and Dean can tell instantly that things are about to get uncomfortable for himself, “Kid, that wasn’t your fault. I know you think this is where _your_ mistakes started, but it ain’t,” Rufus fixes Dean with a crooked eyebrow, quiet for a minute while Dean mulls over his words, considers discarding them, and then says, “You know, when I met you, I thought—that kid, there, I bet he expects the world to just bow at his feet and fix itself,” he says, moustache twitching up in a smile that might as well be just another laugh coming from him “maybe it was your haircut. Or that stupid muscle car.”

"Hm."

"But you're all right, you know. You work for it."

Dean frowns and swats at a bug climbing up his arm, “What else am I supposed to do?”

“Lay down, give up.” Rufus leans back on the bench. Dean can see now just how much he’s sweating and makes a note to buy him some goddamned t-shirts, “Or, like me: disappear.”

Dean almost confesses to Rufus that disappearing is exactly what he did, but Rufus needs to hear something other than that right now, “Hey, man, you didn’t— what you’re doing is good, too. It’s great, actually. It’s _working_ ,” Dean says.

Rufus grunts noncommittally. The lawnmower passes in front of them with a roar, smell of fresh-cut grass and humidity and summer.

“I mean it. What you started here, with people like me and Bela and everybody...man, I can’t tell you how grateful I am for it,” Dean says, “People like us, It’s like we get to have two families, you know? If we fuck up with one, there’s another one there to get us back on our feet.”

“Thought you was gonna say we’re lucky, for a moment there.”

Dean laughs at that. Strangely enough, these past few months he _has_ felt lucky. Not blessed, not totally happy, just lucky.

“So,” Rufus says, new conversation, new page. He picks up the envelope and slides out a colourful birthday invitation, a teddy bear holding a balloon with the number five stretched over it, “I know you’re a little bit older than my grandson but do you got any ideas what a five year old might want for his birthday?”

—

Dean decides that he finally wants to participate in his group meetings as his sixth month approaches. In the past couple weeks, he’s found himself both relying on and being relied upon by his friends, the teetering fear of letting people down held at bay by the look on Rufus’ face when he sees Dean a few days later and shows him a video that his daughter sent of a small boy, Rufus’ grandson Travis, opening pudgy hands to reveal a frog just as it leaps out of the camera’s view, mother and son both shrieking.

This group, he thinks, is more than a weekly outlet, more than a reminder to stay clean,  more than place for learning. It’s for sharing and rebuilding and connecting. It’s for family, like Dean told Rufus, and finding people who will be a part of your life because of what you are, and not in spite of it.

He clears his throat at the microphone, a rough, wet crackle that he makes a sheepish face at, but the rest of the group remains still, quiet, and patient. Rufus leans back easily with his arms crossed in his metal chair, a hard face that used to intimidate Dean, but now he knows it’s just him listening. It’d be easy to make a joke, throw them a line, something to cater to the crowd but this isn't about catering to people. This is about the truth.

“I’m uh — My name is Dean. I’m an alcoholic,” he pauses, those words leave him like lava crawling over fire-scorched earth. “I’m not really good at stuff like this, I’m sorry,” he adds shyly. His eyes fall down to his hands, thumbs brushing over one another. He's not shaking, but he almost wishes he were.

He’d decided on what he wanted to say before he got here. Most people tell stories, and he figured that was good a place as any to start, a funny story from his past. Proof that he’s human, a disaster, but he’s finding his way out of the chaos and back into some semblance of control.

Nobody but Bela has to know about John’s break after Mary died, about his fanatical quest for revenge, about his own struggles with addiction, about the way he raised his sons to be paranoid, alert, hypervigilant, violent, and warriors. Nobody has to know about how he brainwashed his kids into thinking a monster killed their mother, how ghosts were real, how he chased evil through the dark until the dark was all he could see. Enough people hated John when he died. judgement stacked on top of a grave won’t change who he was when he was alive. Enough people showed their contempt for him, and it doesn't fall to Dean to make it all right.

So he tells them about the one and only time he’d ever been to New York. For all their hopping around, they only visited New York once. Dean hated it as much as John did, the high buildings climbing over you, perspective tilting them into a ceiling that threatened to crush you any second. He snuck out at night because he was thirteen and bored and Dad was passed out after coming in late from one of his mysterious meetings with someone who could help, one of the good guys. Sam asked him to stay and play cards with him, but Dean just tucked Sam into bed and told him to go to sleep.

Dean was a cute kid. There aren't a lot of pictures of him but Bobby likes to tease him about it even now. He had a pale face, pinched with desperation, big green eyes and freckles. He was full of fire and anger. Where he went, people bought him drinks, not his first, they gave him drugs, and that _was_ his first, and soon enough he was spinning like a leaf and bumping into people, walls, monsters emerging from the shadows which only made Dean angrier, because they were showing themselves at last, but he didn’t have a gun or a knife or anything, so he started to take a few clumsy swings at them.

And John found him, of course he did. Finding everything but the thing that killed his wife was what John Winchester was best at. He dragged Dean out by the collar of his too-big shirt, hands tight and shaking and genuine worry coming bleeding off him in layers, muttering louder and louder the further away they got from that place.

Dean shouted at him how much he hated him, how much John was ruining his life. Then he told John about the monsters back there, and bitterly spat in his father’s face and told him, triumphantly, that he was doing more than John had ever done in his entire life.

He chuckles into the mic. _I was thirteen_ , he thinks, something like a snowball rolling around his stomach, picking up debris.

Of course, nobody laughs. Not that they ever do for Rufus either, but Dean’s own voice stutters hollowly in the room. He trains his eyes to stop flickering so much, stop jittering over the small group for approval.

He notices Bela sitting in her usual back far seat, closest to the exit. She’s biting her lip and curling her elegant fingers over the leather handle of her purse but she gives Dean a slow, stiff nod that melts some of the tension out of his body.

And right next to her, or about as next as anybody gets to Bela, there’s someone new that must have come in quietly when Dean was speaking, when Dean was focusing so hard on hitting the right notes that he didn't notice Benny with his hands folded in his lap and his hat pulled down low to shade his face.


	4. September

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: John being a terrible dad. Very brief sexuality.

Since the fire that took his mother and his home, Dean’s had a problem with speaking, vocalizing, expressing.

Words came slow and difficult after that night, his mouth unable to wrap sound and form around the ache in his chest. Through the cold months of that year, Dean stopped learning words. Language became pointless. Mornings he spent with his mother, chirping back syllables, playing with magnets and blocks, all of it vanished. Of the three people who made up Dean’s universe, one was dead, one couldn’t talk back, and one seemed to be stuck across a wide chasm that Dean’s voice — even if he could find it — would not carry over.

There was simply no point to speaking.

At least, that’s how John explained Dean’s sudden muteness. It’s how he explained it to other people who asked John in those intermediate months why this suddenly bright, talkative child had diminished so quickly, so quietly, like he was trying to vanish altogether. It’s how he rationalized those months that Dean went silent: an adjustment to losing his mother.

What he did — or didn’t do — as Dean’s father was of no consequence because this was simply grief, and nothing more. Dean would bounce back.

He left Dean with Sam one night the following June, only for ten minutes, he reassured Dean, he’d be back in no time. But then the baby started to cry and ten minutes felt like a torturous eternity, Sam’s voice rolling and hiccuping in anger and panic and loneliness, louder than the flames and sirens of that night.

Dean received a tiny fist to the eye for his trouble, and a flicker of terror made his heart beat painfully fast in his chest as Sam’s weight settled against him. But when he started to hum a song and bounce the baby close to him, the crying quieted, the pain in his chest receded. John found them nearly an hour later, Dean humming and Sam fussing.

Much, much later, when Dean was around eighteen or nineteen, John retold this story like it was a fairy tale, like Dean had been cursed with silence after the fire and the curse broke — just like magic — when he picked up Sam and began to hum the bridge to “Hey Jude”. Caring for Sam had healed Dean, he said, and so he rationalized once again Dean’s new responsibilities within their family. _Taking care of Sam, it made you better. It made you whole again._

The question didn’t occur to Dean until John was dead, but even if it had he knows his throat would have closed up and he wouldn’t have asked it while John was alive.

If this was all a fairy tale, then what role did John play? And where was the happy ending?

—

 _Maybe I am just too fucked up for this,_ he thinks. A lifetime of this and Dean wonders if there ever was a chance for him to be anything but a parasite, a human stain. It was naive of him to think he could do this on his own, get better on his own, or even get better at all. Rufus is stubborn, proud, and he comes out of his personal hell an inspiration. Bela is selfish and righteous, she makes herself an island and scrutinizes everything to guard her borders, and that's what makes her successful, that's what keeps her on track.

Dean is – he isn't sure what he is. Flighty, indecisive, needy. Without his father to guide him, without his brother to be his purpose, without people to anchor him, Dean is adrift.

After a week of pretending that it didn’t happen, a week of avoiding each other’s steps and looking the other way if they happened to be in the same room, Dean skips his group, Benny leaves and Dean isn’t sure where he’s gone, if he’s gone back to the bingo hall or if he’s gone somewhere else. But he waits at home and tries to settle himself but before Benny gets back, Dean’s quaking with nerves and then thirst. He gets a glass of water from the sink in the kitchen and swirls it around his mouth, imagines it’s something else.

Clearing his throat, testing his voice, Dean talks to himself, practices what he wants to say, but when the lock on the door clicks quietly and Benny walks in, shoulders hunched and facing the wall, Dean’s anger and anxiety collide in his throat and all does is jump to his feet and grind out is a short, strangled, “Hi.”

Benny turns to him slowly, face pale and grim but his mouth pulls into a weak smile, “I wanna talk to you.”

The glass of water Dean just chugged sits treacherously close to his esophagus. He wants to scream, maybe at Benny, maybe into a fucking pillow, but his entire vocabulary freezes and he stands there waiting for Benny to speak first.

“I don’t expect you to believe me, but I had no idea, Dean,” Benny says slowly, “I went to that meeting last week because I needed to. I went again today hoping you’d be there, too, so we could talk.”

The first honest sound Dean makes is a harsh, skeptical laugh. Bitter and horrible, “Come on, you aren’t an alcoholic, Benny.”

Benny looks miserable, but not offended, “You don’t know what I am,” he says. The warning in his tone makes Dean pause, “But I’ll try to find another group, if it helps.”

For a moment, Dean sees through his anger and feels like a huge asshole. After all his chirping to Rufus about second families and understanding and so on, who is he to deny someone to be a part of that? “There aren’t any other groups in Lawrence,” he states.

“Then I’ll go outside of town.”

“You walk everywhere.”

Benny shrugs, a tired, resigned curve in his shoulders, “Then maybe this isn’t the place for me,” he says and then, catching the stricken look on Dean’s face, “Don’t worry about me. I’m used to moving around.”

 _No, no, no no no_ , Dean covers his mouth with his hand. Shame spreads over every inch of his skin when he realizes what he’s doing, how fucking selfish he’s being, “Wait, Benny — I’m sorry. I fucking am. I freaked out, that’s all. I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” Benny repeats, slower and softer and Dean is fucking _shameless_ because he closes his eyes and drinks in the gentle kindness in Benny’s voice, lets it brush over his thoughts like a comforting hand, “You’ll do fine without me. You’re already doing great. I believe in you to get better,” he says, “I’ll pack up and get out of here before you wake up.”

—

Dean’s barely in his bed, fully clothed and fighting back angry tears because he doesn’t want Benny to hear him throwing another tantrum, when his cell phone starts vibrating in his pocket. He assumes it’s Bela, since she’s the only one who would ever call him this late, but when he answers with a gloomily the voice that replies makes his heart sink into his shoes.

“Dean? Jesus, thank God. I thought you would have changed numbers by now.”

It’s Sam.

Dean sits up, shocked awake, and presses the heel of his hand into his eye, “Guess I’m just not that smart.”

“Don’t start this, okay? I’m just glad you’re alright.”

 _Who says I am_ , Dean chews the side of his cheek, “Right, because that’s why you’re calling me,”adrenaline surges through him anew, but after everything that’s happened so far tonight, it’s like reanimating a corpse. His hands start to shake and he grips his phone tighter.

“That’s not fair,” Sam says, cold and short.

“Neither is this. What do you want?” A headache starts at the back of his skull.

Sam sighs, a flurry of static that says a hell of a lot more than what he actually voices over the line, “I wanted to know what you’re doing in Lawrence.”

 _Ah, thanks Bobby,_ Dean silently wishes the old man a mouse infestation, “What do you care?”

The line goes quiet, as if Sam is parsing his vocabulary for the accusation Dean can already hear, the one he’s mentally rejected a thousand times but isn’t up to dealing with right at this moment, “I swear to God, Dean, if you sell that house —”

Sam keeps talking, but Dean’s thrown his phone face down on the bedspread so all he hears is a dull buzzing as Sam labels him all sorts of things. Thief, lowlife, deadbeat, drunk. He kept that house all his life, Dean, the least you could do is let someone else sell it, don’t let it go to waste on your bad habits, _et cetera_.

After a few minutes, Dean picks it up again and asks, “You done?”

“You’re unbelievable.”

“Yeah?” Dean’s unspent anger comes back up in his chest, “Out of the two of us, who looked out for dad until he kicked it, huh? Who took care of him when he got sick? Who had to deal with all his crap after he died?”

“Dean—”

“I don’t have to explain _shit_ to you, Sam. This isn’t about your concern for dad’s wishes, okay, be real. You hated him all your life,” Dean barks into the receiver, “And suddenly, you give a fuck about how I’m handling it? Suddenly, you’re worried about what he would have _wanted_?”

The silence that pours between them is like cement, solidifying what Dean already knows is true and that Sam doesn’t want to say. Not again, not for the hundredth time.

It isn’t Sam’s fault that he has no idea that Dean is sober.

But he ends the call resentful about it anyway.

—

It’s past three in the morning, but Dean pounds at Benny’s bedroom door loud enough to rattle the hinges and probably wake the neighbours, too. Dismay weighs him down the longer it takes his roommate to answer and after fourteen seconds, Dean’s certain that Benny snuck out without making a sound and without saying good-bye. That would be just Dean’s luck, and exactly what he deserves.

But the door clicks open, and Benny’s there. Wearied and gloomy looking, but he’s still here.

“Stay,” Dean blurts out, “It’s working, you and me. Us,” the word rolls through him, fast and urgent, before he can catch on to what he just said, “Whatever this is, I mean. I’m sorry I opened my mouth.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“Too bad, I am. You deserve better than this.”

“You do, too.”

Dean bites his lip. Benny always manages to say something that puts him off course because he doesn’t go according to the script Dean’s been playing his entire life, the one where he’s always at fault. It’s like walking blindly, feet moving in some direction but each word he says takes him further away from where he wants to go, further from Benny, because he’s not saying exactly what he means.

So, he says it.

Benny’s eyes widen and his fingers curl around the door frame, but his mouth remains stern line.

“This,” he wags a finger to indicate the two of them, together, an item. Dean’s heart beats painfully against his ribs and he watches Benny’s throat as he swallows thickly, his next words heavy as bricks, “It won’t work.”

“Hang on a minute—”

“This one’s on me. I’m not a good match.”

Dean stares at him, “How the hell d’you figure?”

A long, dark silence stretches between them. The secret that Dean knows Benny has been keeping from him since he moved in, the one that he tries not to think about, seeps into every crack, every gap. He never asked because he didn’t think Benny owed it to him to say, just like he never told Benny that he was a recovering alcoholic.

Things start to crumble into place though, the cold hands, the pale skin, the constant look of bone-deep fatigue. The mini-fridge.

It’s also four-ish in the morning and Dean’s at the end of wits.

“Oh my God,” Dean covers his face with his hands, and then repeats it into his palms, mortified by his behaviour hundredfold, “Oh my God. Are you sick? Like, really sick? Jesus, Benny, I’m sorry, I’m —”

“Dean,” Benny says, suddenly and inexplicably close to laughter, “That ain’t it. Not even close.”

It’s getting unbearable.

Benny must take pity on him though, must be aware that Dean’s fairly close to passing out from emotional exhaustion and confusion, but the truth stuns Dean so badly that he backs away from the door and crumples to the floor, laughing hysterically as Benny tries to explain the ins and outs of his condition.

—

“You sure you don’t wanna celebrate?”

Dean teeters on asking Benny if _he_ feels like calling up Baskin Robins and placing an order for a cake that says “Happy Five Months Sobriety”. What kind of picture they’d draw him in the frosting, what will that poor minimum-wage high school kid who’d have to make him the world’s saddest cake be thinking?

Instead, he just says, “I’m sure, man.”

“All right, Italian take-out and season three of Dr. Sexy?”

Dean grins broadly, “You know me so well.”

The banter settles between them warmly, comfortably, and it’s becoming more and more comfortable each day. Oddly enough, in spite of things taking a turn for the fantastical after Benny revealed to Dean what exactly he was, the two of them seem to have found something in each other that neither expected.

He’s still never seen Benny eat, or drink, and although it’s such a basic, human thing to do Dean now knows that for Benny it’s weighted with guilt no matter how many times Dean tries to normalize the fact that Benny drinks blood. So, not such a human thing to do after all. While Benny watches Dean stuff his face with fettuccine noodles and garlic bread, Dean’s reminded of their first night and how Dean offered to make him spaghetti, his half-baked idea of a welcome dinner, and now it seems flat-out ridiculous in hindsight even though he’s knows that the reality is even more ridiculous.

He swallows down a chunk of bread far too quickly and it rakes the lining his throat, “Can I ask you something? About vampires?”

Benny doesn’t meet his eyes and replies stiffly, “Depends. Ask first.”

Dean picks up a noodle with his fork and twirls it so it sticks, holds it up between them, “Is the garlic thing true?”

Benny starts to laugh, something he does a lot more since telling Dean his secret. More than the light fluttering chuckle that Dean fell in love with not long after meeting him, but a low, rumbling laugh that moves his entire body starting in his belly, “Sorta. It won’t kill me but I do find it repulsive.”

“Oh, so you find me repulsive whenever I have garlic breath. Good to know.”

“Aw, wouldn’t say that.”

They're becoming more at ease about the other thing, though. Although the two things are linked together by Benny's fears and Dean's desperation for Benny to stay, the flirting between them happens like the sun rising, like the birds that sit on Dean's window sill each morning and belt out their shivering notes. Promising, easy, and reliable. And now Dean knows that it’s mutual, it pulses through him like warmth bleeding off a fire.

“What would you say then?” Dean pushes his foot over the cushion between them and rests his toes against Benny’s inner thigh.

Benny looks at it, a moment of consideration. Dean knows that he’s easy with his words but careful and hesitant with his body and he _will_ hold himself back from things he wants. A small tension builds, focused on where Dean’s toes curl into the meat of Benny’s leg, but Benny raises his eyes to Dean and smiles crookedly.

“I would say that you’re utterly ridiculous, especially when you try to be charming.”

Dean rolls his eyes and shoves the fork into his mouth, “People don’t say ‘utterly’ anymore, by the way,” he says through chewing. Benny wrinkles his nose but holds his comment about Dean’s manners, “I can’t believe I didn’t pick up on the hundred-year-old-vampire thing before.”

“I won’t hold it against you.”

—

Dean’s longest relationship with anybody was with a college girl named Cassie. Four months, one week and a day, and then she broke up with him and Dean left Cape Girardeau feeling more than four months older with a ring in his pocket for which he no longer had the receipt. He pawned it the next state over and spent a night at the bar with a hole in his pocket.

It was never Cassie’s fault, though.

Dean had two modes: he’s a commitment-phobe but he clings too hard. Cassie got to experience both polar opposites, and she needed something more permanent, something a little more reassuring and steady.

At the time, Dean couldn't be that, but he _wanted_ to be that.

He had the ring, he had the words he wanted to say to her, but every time he tried to say them, smoke flavoured hands shoved them all back down his throat. If he’d been able to say them, she might have said yes. If he’d had more time with her, he might have been able to say them.

But his dad called from two states over, _Dean, I have a lead._

Cassie asked him, _a lead on what?_

When he told her, he was honest about everything, about his dad and their quest and his training, his entire life. Cassie was quiet as he told her about demons and ghosts and exorcisms, about fighting monsters and the longer he spoke, he could feel her unsticking, her hands crossed and her lips shaking with fear and anger.

And she told him to get out, he understood what this meant for him, what went wrong.

He just wasn’t built for this kind of thing, wasn’t built for balance.

All he’s built for was carrying.

—

He convinces Benny to go on a date with him, not that he calls it that but for all intents and purposes, a trip to the mall for some window shopping and a movie qualifies in this town. Benny expresses reluctance about being in such a public place, but it's Lawrence, Dean reminds him, not Miami, and the mall is mostly deserted on a Tuesday night. Loose crowds walking lazily from store to store, lingering at entrances, hogging all the benches.

Dean's stomach growls loudly while they're checking out new bathroom towels and Benny chuckles gently, a hand suddenly on Dean's back just above his hip. The contact sends a sharp jolt to Dean’s feet, straightening his back as his eyes dart to Benny’s in question, but Benny tilts his head sheepishly and asks:

"Bite to eat?"

That's not really fair, Dean thinks, since it'd just be him stuffing food court tacos into his mouth while Benny sits across from him with that barely-there look of longing. When asked if he _could_ eat regular food, Benny gave him a tight smile and asked in reply if Dean would care to sample some human blood. So, when he asked Benny out, he had already decided that food was off the table.

But he lets Benny lead him to a donut stand anyhow, because Benny smiles at him the whole way, and he obediently takes the bag of white sugared pastries from him. They’re still hot from the deep fryer and smell like heaven.

"This'll put me in a grease coma," he warns Benny, but then shoves an entire donut in his mouth anyway. The icing sugar scatters down the front of his shirt and he brushes it away with sticky fingers.

Benny helps him, patting the sugar of his jacket, “Can’t take you anywhere, can I?” he says.

The movie they end up seeing is a lame action flick sequel, lots of explosions, cheesy one-liners, leads that look too damn handsome covered in dirt and sweat. It pales in comparison to the original but it makes him laugh anyway. The theatre is barely a quarter full, so Dean puts his feet up on the seat in front of him and sinks low into his chair.

True to his word, though, Dean nods off  halfway through the action and dreams about buying bathroom fixtures for the house and selling everything he owns for a set of soft blue towels that he tells the clerk remind him of his mother. The clerk throws them in a bag and rings them up and Dean passes over the keys to his car.

He looks in the bag when he’s out on the street, and they’re not even the towels he wanted.

"Time to go, chief."

Dean jerks away. The credits are rolling, the lights already on all the way and the theatre is empty except for the two of them. The rest of Dean’s donuts slid off his lap at some point and spilled onto the floor.

“Aw, shit,” Dean unsticks himself from Benny’s shoulder, hell of a pain in his neck that triggers a new headache and a cold, hard feeling in his gut. He and Benny both bend down to shove the dirty donuts back into the bag, “Told you not to feed me donuts.”

When they climb into Dean’s car, the parking lot is nearly deserted and Dean waits a couple seconds before turning the key, grateful for the weight of them in his hand after his dream, and then says, “You wanna keep going to those meetings, don’t you?”

Benny doesn’t reply immediately, startled by the suddenness of the question “I don’t want to make it too difficult for you.”

“It won’t, I mean…,” Dean sighs. He hasn’t been back since, and things have been mostly fine but for a few odd dreams, a few wild ideas that start with a trip to the liquor store and end with him likely leaving town, fogginess in the middle. But in spite of all that, he hasn’t, and he has a feeling why that is, “the whole reason I freaked out was you not knowing and then you thinking I was some kind of bum or a headcase.”

“And now?”

Smirking, he turns the ignition, the impala roaring to life, “Well, now I know that I _might_ be a headcase, and my roommate _might_ be a vampire,” he says, “You bein’ there is the least of my worries, especially if it helps you, too.”

Benny eyes Dean from the passenger side, pupils normal-size and that strikes Dean as odd, for some reason, until he realizes that the only light is the streetlamp 50 feet away and Benny can see in the dark.

“Can I ask you something?” Benny says.

“Sure.”

“Why do you take this so easy? Me being what I am, it doesn’t phase you much. You don’t fight me about it. Didn’t ask me to prove anything,” Benny says, suspicion colouring his words, “You don’t seem _scared_.”

Dean shrugs with one arm and pulls away from the parking space, a rippling growl that echoes throughout the empty lot and scares a pair of pigeons from the roof, “This is gonna sound insane, but I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen my entire life.”

“Waiting for a vampire to move in with you?”

“Waiting for monsters to be real,” he says in a tone cold enough to still the air in the car, “Waiting for something to come along and say my dad was right the entire time, I guess, and that it was stupid of me to be the way I was with him,” Dean says to the steering wheel.

“Dean…”

“It makes me wonder, you know?” Dean grinds his palm against the wheel and focuses on guiding the car to the street. The lights from the housing complex across from the mall blur before him and a pocket of air expands in his chest painfully, same constricting as usual, “What else should I have listened to? What gives me the right to be so angry with him? He’s dead, and I still get so mad at him, and now I’m just like...why?”

They hit the pavement of the street slowly, which is fine because there’s not a lot of traffic in Lawrence at eleven at night. The first set of lights they hit, there’s no other cars. Benny’s hand finds Dean’s on the clutch and slowly unfurls his fist to wind his fingers in the spaces between Dean’s.

“I don’t know a lot about your old man, but what I heard, straight from your mouth, he didn’t sound like father material.”

“He saved me, Benny. He got me out of so much shit, and I did a _lot_ of stupid shit when I was a kid,” Dean says. Benny only heard the one story, the one fuck up about the place in New York, but there was so much more, “And I just hated him for it, hated him and hated the way he treated me and Sam, even though I went along with it most of the time. When Sam had enough, I hated him when he told him never to come back, hated him and his stupid quest and how it drove away the one person I had by my side during the whole thing.”

“Quest?”

“The demon that he said killed my mom.”

“Demon?” Benny furrows his brow, quiet for another couple blocks.

When they get out of the car and climb the stairs to the apartment, they’re still quiet, Dean’s memories blackening his thoughts and clouding everything he’s been building up over the past couple months. He unlocks the door to their apartment and immediately heads for a glass of water when he’s inside, Benny following him with more to say, evidently.

“Dean, I don’t know if demons are real,” he says, “But your dad...I think he was just sad and scared and wanted answers. And it made him sick.”

“Hmph.”

“It’s not your job to absolve him of his mistakes. It’s not on you to explain the way he raised you. And you don’t have to accept what he did to you was at all normal or right.”

Dean puts his glass down on the counter and leans back on the heels of his palms to consider what’s in his head at the moment. It’s something he learned from Rufus, to stop and listen to himself whenever he approaches a subject that had driven him to drink before, but when he focuses inward, all he can hear is his heartbeat, feel his lungs expanding and contracting with breath, a faint buzzing in his ear from the movie speakers.

No thirst, though.

He’s talked to people who have said the same things as Benny, tried to impress on him the same ideas, so nothing should change in how Dean feels about it. But none of them knew about John’s true aims, none of them knew just how close Dean was to buying into it himself, none of them knew just how _unbelievable_ the truth of it all was, because none of them have been part of that unbelievable truth.

“You hearin’ me, Dean?”

“Yeah, I hear you,” Dean says hoarsely, “I just…it’s everything I am, the way I was raised, it’s all I got. And now that I’m here trying to make it right, make it _mine_ again, feels like I’m just _playing_ at fine, you know?”

“I do know,” Benny replies, “Speaking from experience, even if it doesn’t feel totally right, bein’ here, you’re not sliding backwards and sometimes, that’s all you can hope for.”

In the time they’d been speaking, Benny somehow managed to get into Dean’s personal bubble, for comfort, mostly. But feeling empty enough that nothing in the world seems like a bad idea to him, Dean reaches out and touches Benny’s collar with two fingers, and Benny’s taken by surprise long enough for Dean to lean forward until their foreheads touch.

Dean’s stomach flutters when Benny’s hand comes up to cradle his jaw and hold him, thumb strong under the corner of Dean’s eye, and Dean takes that as his permission to kiss him, gently enough for a first kiss but long enough for Dean to run out of air and break it off.

Benny’s fingers are in front of Dean’s mouth, feeling the breath puff out of him, “I forget how warm humans are.”

Dean tilts his head so Benny’s fingers brush over the corner of his mouth like an invitation that Benny accepts to pull his fingers over Dean’s cheek, up to his temple, brushing through his hair. His fingers are cool as they comb over Dean’s head.

Dean wishes he could burn the hesitation out of Benny, cure him of this fear he has of being too _in the moment_. He kisses him instead, hungry, lips strong and body pushing against Benny’s, begging for more. His mind already considering options, condoms and lube somewhere in his bedroom not touched for months, wonders if Benny would fuck him if he asked him to.

Benny seems to read his mind, broad hand sneaking between their mouths, his fingers strangely salty on Dean’s lips, so he can speak, “Dean, wait,” he says. The air from his lungs cold on Dean’s mouth.

“Why?” Dean says. His voice is more wind than sound.

“Don’t wanna rush into anything,” he says. _Sure_ , Dean thinks. He can feel Benny’s cock hard against his thigh, Dean's own body responding to the future-memory of having it inside him, legs aching for the fullness, a heavy, insistent tug deep inside his gut.

But Benny’s face is honest and patient, “This was a lot, tonight," he says. There's something else there, some insecurity that makes him sound stretched thin, but Dean can't figure out whether it's a vampire thing or something else, "It was enough. I don’t wanna push our luck.”

Sounds like a vampire thing, “Benny, I’m ready,” he says, “I promise, I am.”

Benny smiles at him and raises an eyebrow, “Maybe you are. But I’m not. I don’t know if I can..." his brow crinkles in worry, frustration. Benny’s eloquence goes out the window, "I would like to, but I don't feel these things for a lot of people and haven’t for a long time. It'll take some getting used to."

Not a vampire thing, then. Dean opens his mouth to possibly apologize or agree but something stutters out, a moan he’d been keeping in, saving for later, over the sob he’s been sitting on since Benny first asked him _why are you so okay with this._ He _is_ okay with it, the vampire things and the not-vampire things. But, Benny makes a good point for the both of them, and the last thing Dean wants to do now is _lose_ Benny over something this _ordinary._

“So, you wanna take it slow?” Dean finally manages to say.

Benny chuckles and scrubs at Dean’s hair, tingles skittering down his spine,“If it’s alright with you,” he says sheepishly, “It's not something you did, Dean. Just the way I am. But this,” he pecks Dean’s lips once more, “was nice. Thank you, for everything.”


	5. October

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Nothing new, really :)

Sam teeters like an unwanted, broken coat rack in the middle of the main room, looking down at Benny and taking in the funny clothes, the odd hat, the overall rustic appearance and then switches his gaze back to his brother.

Sam doesn’t sneer, but he’s well practised in a tone that makes Dean feel ashamed, “I can’t believe you.”

“Hello to you, too.” Dean remarks and throws his keys on the kitchen counter and they slide right off the other side. His phone vibrates, likely Frank asking why the hell he bailed on work, again, even though there was nothing to be done there today and he just wants someone to listen to him rant.

Looking at his brother now, a year and a half after their father’s funeral, Dean tries to figure out just _how_ Sam, of all people, could wind up looking worse off than himself. Maybe it’s just age finally swallowing up his youthful features, but then again Sam’s only thirty and he’s gaunt, pale, unshaven, his hair long and unkempt. He had dark rings around his eyes, which look glassy and red like he hasn’t slept properly in weeks, like he hasn’t actually been living comfortably with his girlfriend in Texas.

Benny texted Dean at work that a man claiming to be Dean’s brother had shown up at the apartment and Dean simply responded with _be there soon_. What these two have been talking about while Dean raced home to figure out what the hell was going on, Dean hasn’t a clue. But Benny is well across the room from Sam with his mouth set in a flat line and there’s a pulsing at his temple that Dean hasn’t ever seen before.

“You alright?” Dean asks them both. He can’t help it, big brother instinct or whatever. He knows that he cares about Sam in ways that go far beyond what’s considered healthy or normal, beyond what should be his responsibility, but it’s a hard habit to break. Impossible to flip the switch between caring and not caring or finding some happy balance in the middle. Sam looks like he’s having a hard time, and Dean feels like it’s completely his fault, that it must have something to do with him.

“I’m fine,” Sam says stiffly. His hands are shoved in his pockets as far as they’ll go, “Just glad to see you,” strained, bitter.

“Sam…” Dean starts, “About that phone call—”

“I don’t want your apology. I just want an explanation.”

A barb of fury spikes through Dean, but he manages to keep his voice even and his mind organized, a pile of reasons stacked like bricks, ready to build up a wall if necessary, “An explanation of what?”

Sam stares at him like he’s just grown a third head, and then looks at Benny,  a cough of laughter exploding from him like he just can’t believe whatever _this_ is, “You disappeared, Dean. Moved out of your place without telling me where you were going? I had no idea where you would go, why you would go. And I had to hear through _Bobby_ that you came back to Lawrence, and he only told me after a few drinks.”

Dean focuses on action, distraction. He brushes past Sam and into the kitchen where he can pick his keys up off the floor, get some water, start dinner for three. Benny circles like a bird of prey into Dean’s space with his eyes on Sam. Dean can practically read his thoughts, _this isn’t the brother that Dean spoke so fondly of_.

“I thought you were dead, Dean. I thought you’d died somewhere all alone, just like Dad.”

“Sam,” Dean slams down an empty bowl, doesn’t even bother correcting Sam about how their father died, “I’m sorry.”

“Do you even have anything better than ‘sorry’?”

“Well, what the fuck do you want from me?” Dean practically shouts.

“I want you to be smart, Dean. I want you to be responsible. Do you have any idea what you’re doing here?” Sam asks, and Dean feels the same roll of anger as he did when Sam called and accused him of taking advantage of their dead father’s lack of a will, “Listen, I know things are hard for you, and I know I haven’t been the greatest brother. I should have answered your calls. I don’t blame you for giving up on me, but if you come back with me to Texas, I’ve got a spare room. You can stay there and we can figure this out together. You can get better.”

Something cracks inside Dean, losing his balance but he knows exactly where this is all going. Anger bursts through his veins like lightning. He opens his mouth to say something, to say _no_ , probably, but then it hits him that perhaps Sam has a point, and that doing this as a family would make the most sense, would be the most fair.

But he knows – _knows_ – what happens to him when he’s with Sam. He knows, because it’s been this way since they were kids, and even worse since Dad died. Sam is not like Dean, Sam turned out differently. Where Dean took after their father’s vices, Sam took after his attitude, took after his pride, his control.

His fingers fold into fists, nails digging into his palm to control the shaking, unable to discern if he’s angry, scared, sorry, or giving up.

He hears a breath shaped like his name. Benny is by the sink, filling a glass of water. Of course, it’s not for himself because he’s a damn vampire, but Dean still buzzes with surprise when Benny shoves it into his hand and pats him on the shoulder. Neither pushing nor pulling, just waiting, a soft weight that reminds Dean of the blanket still tucked in with his pillows. All Dean wants to do is fall into him.

Sam is holding out his hands, hoping to catch an answer like it’ll jump from a third storey window.

“Listen,” Dean starts. His voice shakes but he doesn’t bother trying to mask it, “I’m sorry I came out here without your _permission_. I do know what I’m doing. I’m…taking care of things, all right?” Sam goes to respond but Dean breaks him off right away, “We can talk more about this later. I’ll take you to the place and show you what I’m doing.” _When I don’t want to drown myself in whatever I can get my hands on_ , “There’s the couch, if you don’t have a place to stay.”

“That’s it? You’re just gonna tell me _it’ll all make sense later_?” Sam bites back, but in spite of his fury he’s backing down, Dean can tell. Years of experience. “This isn’t you at all, Dean. You know who you sound like, right?”

“I know. Just like dad. But you know what?”

“What.”

“So do you.”

—

Sam’s dead asleep on the couch after a tense dinner, long limbs hanging over the edges and an old comforter thrown over him like a tarp before Dean shuffles his way to his bedroom door, only to make it halfway, sinking down the wall to sit on the floor in a heap. At some point during the evening, Benny had retreated to the kitchen to clean up the dishes and wipe down the counters. His feet are quiet on the carpet but he can’t ever hide the creaking of his bones.

“You all right, chief?”

“I’ll be fine,” Dean replies, like a wind-up toy.

“That’s getting old, you know.”

Dean’s too exhausted to argue anymore, least of all with Benny who he knows was clueless to the tension between Dean and his brother, the years of resentment and misunderstanding that flow like a toxic waste water under a rickety bridge. It would take weeks to explain it all to Benny, and even then Dean wouldn’t know how to put into words a lot of what he and Sam are.

“Can I stay in your room tonight? With you?” It’s a lot to ask, he knows. They haven’t reached _that_ point of comfort with each other, and Benny appears taken aback by the frank request, but after a small moment of surprise he extends his hand to help Dean off the floor.

Dean says nothing until he’s horizontal on Benny’s bed, which smells good but faintly chemical, like fresh laundry, on his side and staring at Benny’s back as the vampire shucks his coat and takes off his hat. Still fully clothed because if he takes anything off he might shiver into pieces, Dean wriggles under the comforters and watches silently as Benny pulls his white henley over his head and tosses it at a basket in the corner. It goes in.

He lies down next to Dean in an undershirt that doesn’t do much to hide his light coloured chest hair.

This isn’t exactly how Dean wanted to end up in Benny’s bed, but it is what it is. With a deep shuddering breath, he speaks in hushed tones, picturing Sam with his ear pressed to the door, "I _don't_ know what I'm doing, okay? I never have. Someone's always just told me that things are supposed to be this way, things are supposed to be that way as I listen to them because — I dunno — I ain't as smart as them," Dean says.

It's too dark in Benny's room but he swears he can see him open his mouth to say something, to contradict Dean, tell him how smart he actually is, "My dad wasn't proud of me or my brother for our brains, just whether or not we could follow orders. But I saw how smart Sam was. I made sure he did his homework and went to school. Nobody did that for me but I did it for him," _And look how he thanks me_ , Dean thinks bitterly. The endless judgement, the dissatisfaction, Sam’s words still ringing in Dean's ears like an accusation: _This isn't you_.

Once upon a time, Dean would have listened to that.

What's changed, he wonders. Who's changed?

Is it even okay to change?

Dean’s thought process is intercepted by Benny's fingers as they find Dean's where they’ve somehow managed to curl up on Benny’s sternum, like a claw, and he laces them together, brings them up to his mouth to kiss Dean's fingers, the words stopping in Dean's throat and building up until all he can release is a small cry.

He can’t even remember who the last person was that he cried in front of.

"I don't wanna get in between you and the only family you have left," Benny says, his breath cool on Dean's fingers as he speaks, "But I also have eyes, and I can see that there’s a lot that you and your brother have been through, together and apart. And there’s a lot that you don’t know about each other."

“He thinks he knows me—”

“And you think you know him,” Benny says, “Look, I’m not an expert on human relations,” he goes on, kneading Dean’s hand with his own, “But what I saw in there was two wounded men lashing out at each other because it’s all they remember how to do.”

Dean stares, a lump in his throat as he tries to understand what Benny’s saying. No, understanding it is easy. Admitting that Benny’s right, not so much. The answer is right there, he supposes. Even before John died, when they were younger, Sam was there, his emotions unintentionally steering Dean’s feelings. Even as he tried to go in one direction Sam would insist on another because that’s what he needed Dean to be. When Sam was angry, Dean fought the things he was angry with. When Sam was upset, Dean figured out what he was doing wrong and promised to do better. When Sam was lonely, Dean was there. When Sam demanded space, Dean achingly gave it to him. The constant tugging in every direction, it tore him to pieces. He’s slowly stitching himself back together, with the help of his friends, but he’s changed, he’s not the same person. But Sam—he is, and he needs Dean present, he needs him strong, he needs him whole.

As angry as Dean is, he knows it's not Sam’s aim, to rip down everything Dean’s working for, but he knows that it can’t keep happening, and that someone has to make a decision for it to stop.

He’s recovering and he’s filling the craggy pits in his life with the kinds of things that make the struggle worth it. People, like Bela and Rufus and Benny, hope, and love maybe. And Sam isn't. Sam's still boiling with directionless rage and vengeance. Sam’s still looking for things to fight, real or imagined.

Every single one of his heartbeats aches to let Sam back in right now, find some way to compromise. But when it comes to his brother, there are no compromises.

“He’s all I got left,” Dean’s voice is small, tense, a leaf hanging onto a dead branch.

Benny holds his hand, cool and comforting, and doesn’t say a word in reply. He waits for Dean to find the words he wants to say, if he wants to say any at all. When he and Sam were kids and staying at Bobby’s, whenever Dean got angry, the aimless kind where he can’t yell at Sam, can’t yell at Dad, so he just wants to yell, he would snag one of the junkers out of Bobby’s yard and drive to the other side of Sioux Falls and hide out in some dive bar where they don’t even ask for I.D. He’d drag his tail home eventually, sporting a bruise and a fat lip from picking a fight over a pool match.

Bobby’d give him ice, and then he’d say “Family is supposed to make you miserable”. He’d repeated that a lot, and Dean tried to understand it, thought he understood it for so long. Dean was still young enough to believe that Bobby held all the answers his dad didn’t.

“I need space, right? I did the right thing, I think,” Dean says finally, voice cracking, “Sam has to understand that. He can’t blame me for trying to make things better.”

“You gonna tell him about—”

“About us?” Dean’s eyes go wide, “I—I guess I have to, eventually.”

Benny chuckles, “Isn’t what I meant, really. Although, that too,” he says, “I was talking about your chip.”

“Oh,” Dean says softly. He should, Sam might stop treating him like a lost cause if he knows what Dean’s doing all on his own to get better, “Yeah, I will. Somehow.”

Benny makes a small noise of assent, “I know I’m not a shining example of good choices, but I think you’re making good choices.”

Dean forces a tiny laugh, for Benny’s sake, for his sake to remind him that this isn’t the end of the world, even though it feels like the longer he gets away from that admission, from saying out loud that he needs to keep his distance from Sam a little while longer, the closer he is to dying, suffocating.

“I’m proud of you,” Benny’s fingers are there, cool and soft, on Dean’s cheek.

“Why?”

“For fighting. For you and your brother.”

Dean doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean, because fighting is what fucked things up so badly in the first place, but he trusts Benny, and if Benny trusts Dean then he supposes he has to trust that, too, “Thanks, man.”

He rolls over to cover Benny’s body with his and kisses him so long that he gets light-headed. Benny places his hands on Dean’s thighs and moves them up his body until he’s holding him in something that wants to be a full-bodied hug, so Dean relents and unsticks their lips and hides his face in the crook of Benny’s neck, inhaling his clean, cool smell and letting the vampire just hold him.

He falls asleep with Benny’s arms around him and dreams about waves and water.

—

As Dean promised, he and Sam visit their home and for all the build up to that moment, not much happens at all. Nothing changes, nothing falls into place, nothing emerges from the smoke or shadows stuck in the walls to give meaning to their fragmented selves. Nothing to fill cracks with, nothing to build a bridge upon. Sam remembers even less about this house, this space, all the corners and edges and secret places that Dean knew briefly as a child are meaningless to him. All the blank spaces on the walls where Dean remembers photographs, decorations, are just plain blank walls.

He asks Dean "Which bedroom was mine?" and an ache pulls forward in Dean’s chest for how much he would give to not answer that question, to not even know the _answer_ to that question. But when he does, and he sees Sam's expression vacant and expressionless and Dean understands that he has a shape to his grief; Sam does not.

At least, not this particular shape.

"This is weird," is Sam's simple statement with his feet together dead centre in his rebuilt nursery. He faces one wall as though he’s picturing something, a crib, probably, but Dean closes his eyes and sees it nestled along the opposite wall, mobile tinkering above and long blonde hair cascading down, light combing through like fingers, "There's just...nothing here."

“What’d you expect?” Dean asks. Roiling anger in the pit of his stomach churns around Sam’s careless dismissal. _It’s not his fault_ , Dean was four; Sam was less than a year old.

Dean’s little brother takes one hand out of his pocket and pulls it through his shaggy hair, mouth drawn in a strange sort of grimace, like he’s struggling to remember _something_ but isn’t sure if what’s forming in his mind is fiction or reality, story or truth, “I don’t know. Dad just spoke so much about that night, I guess I thought I’d feel...”

Straining to smile at Sam, Dean nods towards the hallway, “C’mon. I’ll show you my room.”

Sam waits for fifteen more seconds, silent and still and gazing at the walls, the ceiling, the window, listening and watching. One thing they still have in common, apparently: they both expected something to happen.

When they leave after an hour, they stop beside the large tree, gnarled top branches dripping leaves onto the lawn. Dean leans against the bark and looks across the street. Since he’s been coming here more often, the kids around the neighbourhood have not settled down about it, but they do wave to him if they see him working outside.

“I don’t get it,” Sam comments with his hands still deep in his pockets.

“Don’t get what?”

“Why you’re doing this,” he says, “I mean, yeah, sure, it’s _Dad’s_ house, but now it’s just a big, worn down, empty shell,” Sam says. He’s still looking up at the window where his nursery was. Dean can’t turn around to join him, “What can this do for you that family can’t?”

At least he doesn't say it like he’s questioning Dean’s intelligence this time. His confusion is honest, and Dean realizes now that it’s okay if he and Sam aren’t on the same page at all times.

He turns around and pats Sam on the shoulder, offers to take him out for lunch. Sam nods, and then pointedly offers Dean a room in Texas one more time, which Dean turns down, firmly. He doesn’t know where he wants to build up a future, that much is starting to become clear, but he knows that he can’t build one all alone with Sam.

"We'd hate each other in two weeks," he says, "You know how it goes.”

“It’ll be different this time,” Sam begs. He’s lonely, lost, reliant on having a big brother around to feel like he matters, and constantly resentful for it. But he’s also thirty years old.

“It won’t. As long as we’re around each other, we won’t ever stop being scared, mean little kids,” he says, “It’s better this way, Sam.”

—

A few day later, he drags Benny with him to the house. It’s a low move, but he tells Sam somewhat bluntly that he and Benny are going out for dinner and leaves before Sam can apply any more uncomfortable questioning to either of them. The past few days have been awkward enough in the apartment and Sam’s too smart to _not_ have noticed a number of things about Benny that don’t add up, but Dean’s put high walls up around that particular issue. The tension between the brothers has relaxed since Dean gave Sam the tour of the Winchester home, and thankfully Sam appears to be as unready as Dean to test their relationship any further, at least for the time being.

Standing together outside the house, Benny whistles a low, appreciative note, probably just out of courtesy but when Dean looks up at it, he, too, has to admit that it’s a pretty nice home. Perfect for a young family, perfect for growing. The twisted tree in the front begs a swing, and Dean imagines himself as a child pushing his little brother while the mud sticks to his soles. The thought hits Dean like a cold gust, raising the hair on his arms. If he chooses to make a home here, he’ll be living those non-memories each and every day. He’ll spend his days picturing what life _could_ have been like, living in a false history until, like Sam, he won’t be able to differentiate between what’s real and what’s just a story he learned, or a story he tells himself.

Autumn has taken the leaves from the trees, gold and yellow littering the yard like bright gems in the mid-morning light. He assured Missouri that he could take care of the yardwork this year, so he gets to work with the rakes he borrowed from Rufus and starts filling garbage bags. Benny helps, singing something low and sweet as he works, something old that would sound beautiful through antique radio speakers. He works hard, harder than Dean, and obviously never breaks a sweat, but he has to stop after an hour or so and sheepishly tip his hat at Dean.

“Sun’s still got rays.”

Dean motions for them to head inside. His arms are killing him, anyway, and his back would agree with sitting down for a while.

The kitchen feels dark even after Dean flicks the light switch and he imagines the smell of baking and flowers, Benny’s song still in his head, when he stands by the sink to wash dirt off his hands. The cheap coffeemaker he brought with them just to keep here while he worked around the house sits on the counter like a time traveller lost in a foreign country, surrounded by 1970s appliances with dials and bells instead of digital displays and electronic beeps. He plugs it in and starts making a pot.

“It’s a nice place,” Benny says leaning against the counter beside Dean. The smell of autumn clings to him like a second skin, mingling with the flowery scent that hovers around Dean like a ghost, “It really is.”

“That’s because you’re like a hundred and fifty,” Dean replies over the sound of running water.

Benny chuckles and squeezes between Dean and the kitchen island, touching Dean’s shoulder blade as he does. The soft, gentle contact sends a shiver up Dean’s back and chases away the phantom scent of lilacs for Benny’s outdoorsy smell. Oblivious to his effect on Dean, Benny heads between the kitchen and the dining room like he’s in a church, fingers brushing furniture as he passes almost reverently. Dean ignores him and ignores the omnipresent _déjà vu_ that jumped him as soon as he walked in the front door, and finds a cupboard full of dusty mugs that might fall apart if he picks them up. He chooses his half empty travel mug instead.

“Dean, can I ask you something?”

Dean startles at the sound of Benny’s voice piercing the silence and drops the lid of his mug on the floor. Swearing, he looks up at Benny and raises his eyebrows in affirmation.

“I know what you want to do about you and your brother, but when you said to me about telling Sam about us…what exactly do you think of when you think about, uh,” somehow, Benny reddens, “Us?”

Dean stares at him. The blush might just be his imagination. The coffee pot bubbles and hisses.

“I…don’t know,” he replies, perfectly honest, shrugging like it’s not a big deal, “I _like_ us.”

“I know. So do I,” Benny says with a distant smile, “But, you just said, I’m _like a hundred and fifty._ That means something in the long run.”

“Benny,” Dean sighs, “This isn’t…that’s not…We don’t have to talk about that, okay?”

“We should.”

“Why?” Dean asks, suddenly suspicious of Benny’s motives for even bringing this up, “What’s going on? What did Sam say?”

Benny’s face says it all, but he has the good spirit to laugh when he replies, “‘If you hurt him, they won’t find your body.’”

Dean knew he couldn’t keep _that_ from Sam very long, but still, “Jesus Christ.”

“He has a point, Dean. I’m not a good fit. Not in this world, not for you. Somewhere down the line, this is gonna hurt you,” Benny says quietly.

It doesn’t escape Dean that Benny only speaks about hurting _Dean_ , and not how the fact that Dean won’t stay young forever will hurt Benny, too, but that’s just typical of Benny to not even consider that his own feelings factor into the decisions they make together.

“Listen to me,” Dean says, low and serious as he walks across the kitchen to stand so close to Benny that their toes are nearly touching, “Whatever’s going to happen will happen, but I’m not gonna say _adios_ to you just because I don’t know what _might_ happen, or because I’m scared.”

“You ought to be scared, Dean,” Benny says.

“I know. You know I am. I’m fucking terrified, but I’m terrified lately of…of everything. Of you, of Sam, of this...this fucking house,” Dean says, and it’s only after Benny raises his eyebrow that he realizes he admitted that out loud, “But with you – I mean, yeah, I’m _scared_. You’re a damn vampire. But I also trust you,” Dean licks his lips. His hands, which started to shake while he was still making coffee in the kitchen, are still in his pockets, “I don’t wanna give up. This is something I _want._ ”

Benny, much to Dean’s dismay, looks a bit choked up and Dean slams down on his emotions to keep himself from doing the same, but he feels a pressure behind his eyes anyway.

“Aw, come on, chief. Don’t do that,” Benny laughs as Dean presses the heel of his right hand against his eye like he can dam up the tears.

“You started it.”

Benny’s eyes crinkle with laughter, “Suppose I did.”

The coffee maker beeps and hisses in the next room, “You’re not gonna run out on me, are you?” Dean asks in a small voice. He wouldn’t try to _stop_ Benny, not that he thinks he could, but the idea of being without him now, when they’re on the verge of something, when _Dean’s_ on the verge of something…

“You deserve better, Dean. I know I’m a broken record, but it’s true,” Benny sighs. A crushing grip around Dean’s heart threatens to choke him, but Benny looks up and smiles, “But as long as you want me, I’m here for you, brother.”

—

Sam sticks around in Lawrence for a couple weeks and finally admits to Dean that his girlfriend dumped him and moved out. It doesn’t come as a surprise to Dean, because he knows Sam, and he knows that while Sam pulls for his independence, if he gets hurt he gravitates towards the familiar, towards Dean or to Dad, and when Amelia left him for her ex, he sought out the only thing left.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Sam confesses, after knocking on Dean’s apartment door after a night out, sagging against the doorframe, “I mean,” he slurs. Dean takes a step back and steels himself against the sticky smell of alcohol, “I got _out_. I got away from you two, you n’ Dad. I hated you both so much, didn’t ever want to see you again. Even after I dropped out of school and met Amelia, I thought, well, things could be worse, right? Could be back home with dad and Dean.”

Bela and Rufus observe the scene from the sofa, a pile of colourful photographs, a kid’s birthday party, scattered all over the coffee table and cushion between them as Dean tries to guide Sam through the main room to his bedroom to sleep it off. Sam, however, shrugs away from his brother and takes a detour into the kitchen, opening the cupboards like he’s looking for something.

Rufus and Dean share a glance, and Rufus simply nods towards Bela who’s averted her eyes in the other direction and is nervously digging her manicured nails into the skin just above her knee where her skirt ends. _It’s Sam_ , he realizes. Right now, Sam is exactly the thing that puts her right over the edge. Guilt burns in Dean’s chest, but then Sam slams the fridge door and then Dean’s just angry at the entire situation.

“Sam, this isn’t a good time,” Dean says through gritted teeth. Rufus nods lets Dean handle Sam while he pours his attention into talking quietly to Bela. Dean turns on Sam again, “You’re way out of line.”

“Well, thanks for letting me know and I’m really, really _sorry_ ,” Sam drawls, “Thought I could make it without you, but as soon as she left I came crawling back home. Back to you, whatever. So I guess,” he teeters, squints over the half-wall into the main room at Dean’s visitors like he’s considering whether or not he should say this in front of strangers, “I guess I’m just as pathetic as you.”

For some reason, it doesn’t claw into Dean quite as badly as it has in the past. He hears Bela breathe out a quiet sob behind him, and calms the rage thudding against his chest before he speaks again.

“Come on, big guy. You done? You said what you needed to say, now it’s time for bed,” Dean says stiffly. He grabs Sam’s elbow and leads him out of sight. Sam, after his outburst, seems to have been deflated of his clumsy defiance and falls onto Dean’s bed like a crumbling tower. Dean waits by the door until he can hear loud snoring before going back to check on Bela and Rufus.

When Sam finally wakes up late the next morning, he pukes into the garbage can Dean set beside the bed, chugs two glasses of water and throws up again, and then sits with a chastened look on his face, arms around Dean’s pillow.

“That was stupid.”

Dean shrugs, “You were upset. Been there.”

Sam glares, eyes still bleary from sleep and hangover, offended at being compared to Dean, but he holds off his insults and softens his expression, “I’m sorry. You had people over. That woman was upset, wasn’t she?” he says, “D’you remember when Dad used to do that? Go out, get drunk, and then come back and crash whatever we had going on? God, I feel like such an idiot. Can you tell them I’m sorry?”

Over a late breakfast of fried potatoes and bacon, Sam keeps talking.

“I don’t want us to _not_ be brothers, Dean. I don’t want to go the rest of my life pretending that I’m an only child because I’m too embarrassed to talk about you, and how much I look up to you even though...you know,” Sam says. Dean stabs a potato ferociously but finds that sometimes, it’s easier to just let Sam talk it out, let the words flow over his skin like water, and when he realizes that he’s not letting it get to him, a kernel of _something_ starts to form. The words are there, and then they’re gone, and so are all the emotions, both negative and positive, that Sam’s words stir up, “But, I guess...I guess we do bring out something in each other that isn’t good. For either of us. Maybe it’s best if we just, you know, stay apart.”

Dean looks up suddenly from his plate and starts to laugh.

—

The feeling of impermanence over breakfast with Sam lingers, and something about what Benny said at the house sticks to him, irritating him and giving him no rest. Sam, of course, thinks he’s stumbled onto a revelation all by himself: Things cannot remain as they are, but as long as he understands that for the _both_ of them, Dean will let him believe it’s his idea. As Sam rambled, Dean felt the clear feeling of _this will pass_ , and with that realization what he needed to do was suddenly staring him right in the face: his time in Lawrence was coming to an end.

As for Benny, he doesn’t like to think about it, it’s not even a priority for him right now, but Benny has a point about the entire concept of _them_. Dean -- against all better reason telling him not to -- wants _this_. But Dean’s already getting old, and Benny’s much, much older and at a certain point those two facts will conflict. Not for a long time, at least to Dean. For Benny, this will be over in no time. And for that reason, Dean owes it to him to make the most of the time they can share together. And making the most of it, he starts to realize, means getting out of this liminal state as soon as possible.

He asks Benny, braver than he feels, what he thinks about making it official.

"Steady, huh?"

"About as steady as either of us can be," Dean tries on a joke and wins a chuckle from Benny. They had sex for the first time the other night after a long talk. For Dean, the milestone wouldn't have normally phased him much but with Benny it became something far more important. It’s supposed to be a conversation, Dean knows  _ that _ , but it was easily the most talkative sex he’s ever had in his life. A constant stream of directions, affirmations, and declinations and Benny, who barely trusts himself around Dean when he gets a papercut, barely batted an eye when Dean told him where and how to touch him, to hold him down, to go slower, to go deeper, to which he replied with his own wants and needs. Benny admitted to having limited experience, but his curious, cautious hands around Dean’s throat, cool fingers over the hot blush painting Dean’s cheeks and shoulders, were sure and never tightened. 

_ He’s stronger than he thinks he is _ , Dean realized later when he and Benny were lying side-by-side, but when he tried to whisper it to Benny he chickened out and kissed the little soft spot just below his ear instead. 

"This isn't too fast for you, is it?" Dean's worried about pushing it, not for himself, but for Benny. Certainty is not something Dean is that familiar with, but he's feeling that he might be close to it, with everything. With the house, with Sam, with Benny.

"I could get used to it. Waking up to you stuck to me like a limpet," Benny says carefully, and then watching the way Dean’s feet bounce nervously on the floor, "But by the way you're teetering on your toes you've got something a bit more in mind than sleeping together."

Dean's bursting, biting his lip to keep it in what he wants to do, what he knows he wants to do but isn't sure what people will say, what Benny will say, what Sam will _do_.

But he'll give it a shot.


	6. November

Sam stares at him.

“Dean,” he says slowly, “be real.”

“I am real. Let’s sell the house,” Dean shakes the key Missouri dropped into his palm months ago. It’s less heavy than it was now that he knows that it's not meant for him. It’s not meant for either of them. He asked Sam to come with him once more, but stopped Sam going up the front path to put his new plan out there for Sam to consider.

“But…” Sam takes the key. It’s ridiculously small in his large hand, “You wanted it. You fixed it up, did a lot of good work on it,” he says, “You said you wanted to live there. I _saw_ your face when we were in here last week, Dean. It was like...you _felt_ things that I didn’t.”

“I did, and I changed my mind,” he says, unsure if he needs to explain why, but choosing not to anyway. The private battle with his grief is his own, the past a spectre peering around the corner, through the curtains, arms out for a cold hug. Every moment of familiarity between himself and this place is shot through with dark, undercurrent longing for something that is not and can never be. This strange, unexpected victory against history is shared between only himself and with Benny, for now, “It isn’t going to work for me. And I know you think it’s stupid anyway, so we’ll sell the house to someone who can get something good out of it,” Dean says and starts to walk away, but says over his shoulder, “You can go finish school with your half, if you want.”

“Dean…”

“Sam—don’t. Just, don’t go there, okay? I’m sick of arguing. I’m sick of fighting with you. I’m sick of this…weird sibling rivalry where you think I’m too fucked up to make my own decisions and I think you’re fucked up to make your own decisions when we’re both probably too fucked up to be too sure of anything,” he says. Sam rises to the gentle insult so Dean cuts him off again, “But just…let me at least pretend that I’m sure about this,” Dean says, voice rising and falling as he does his best to maintain his emotions.

Sam still stares at him like he’s started speaking fluent Russian.

“And I’ll let you pretend that you aren’t actually relieved by all this.”

Sam gapes for a moment, and then says, “Shut up.”

“Only if you do. Now, let’s go get lunch. Pizza? Or you can get a salad, if you want to anger the gods of good food,” Dean suggests. He starts to turn away from the house, back to his car.

“Dean, wait,” Sam interrupts and throws a meaningful glance at the house. Dean follows his gaze. If he never sets foot in there again, it will be fine with him, “Is this about Benny?” Sam says Benny's name like pronouncing a curse word in another language.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I—I just—”

“We’re roommates.”

Sam looks unimpressed, kind of like the first time he walked in on Dean with a girl, “Dean, come on.”

“I’m just fucking with you,” Dean cracks a smile, lightness eking out of him that he’s having difficulty controlling. This feels familiar, but for once in a good way. Messing around with Sam is his birthright as the older brother, “Me n’ Benny are…he’s…I care about him. A lot. Not sure how many details you want, but he cares about me, too. He looks out for me when I’m thinking of doing something stupid.”

“Like uprooting your entire life twice in one year?”

Rolling his eyes, Dean sighs, “Give me a break, Sam,” he digs into his pocket and flips his six month chip at Sam. Rufus has been keeping him up to date. Sam catches it with both hands, key still in his palm, and holds it like he’ll crush it in his gigantic fingers. It takes a few seconds for it to register what he’s holding, but when it does his expression goes slack.

“Shit, Dean — I — I had no idea,” he says, bewildered, proud, and slowly there's the mortified realization for how he’s behaved in the past week, “That’s…”

Dean can already see what’s coming by the way Sam lurches forward like a bull ready to charge, enormous arms out and open, “Yeah, yeah,” he says, his own voice tight with the resonance of this moment, finally here, finally real. His own arms wrap around his brother’s neck and his face crashes into Sam’s shoulder. They haven’t hugged in years, the last time being when Sam finally left Dean and John for good, a quick, tense clutch out the door, but there’s no awkward moment of figuring out how to do it again.

“Yeah, so,” when they part, Dean’s blinking rapidly and trying to regain his composure, “I haven’t always had my shit in order. After Dad died I _really_ didn’t have it together.”

“Neither of us did.”

“Right, but I’m learning, Sam. I’m responsible for my actions. I make my own mistakes,” he says, repeating words that have both dug into him and made him feel like shit, but which have also healed him in ways that he still doesn’t quite understand. He remembers Rufus’ unwaverable insistence, _what happened here when we were kids, that’s not one of them_ , “So even if this is the dumbest decision of my life, it’s on me. We’ll sell the house and make our peace with this place.”

Sam’s still staring at the chip and the key, side by side in his hand, but he suddenly breaks free and meets Dean’s eyes, “Are you staying in town?” he says, a sharpness at the edge of his words, “I was...I don’t know if I can go back to Texas. After Amelia, things are just..." he peters off and sighs, "There's a reason I came here, too. But if I can get into a school around here…” Sam says, already working out the details in his head, no doubt. He’s a machine, “I thought you wanted space from me.”

“It’s for the best,” Dean repeats, mantra like, “But uh...you do whatever you feel like, here. Benny and I are looking to move.” Dean says the words and still doesn’t believe them. When he’d asked Benny, he knew he was asking far too much of his roommate – his boyfriend – especially after all of Benny’s warnings and trepidation, but he has a feeling that Benny would follow him into Hell if he asked.

“Together?”

“Yeah. Somewhere coastal. Benny says he’d lived along the Gulf for uh…” Dean almost says twenty-five years, but then remembers the whole old vampire thing that Sam doesn’t yet know about, “a long time.”

“You’re pretty serious about him,” Sam looks impressed this time.

Shrugging feels almost like an insult, “We’re good together.”

Sam makes a noise of disgust and amusement, “Honestly…I haven’t seen enough to make any judgement about him.”

“It’s not your job to,” Dean says, “So, is this a deal?”

Out of the two of them, Dean figured Sam would be the one to agree right away, this being what he’s always wanted: a way out, a way to free himself from the strange ghosts that have haunted their family for decades and put both of their lives so off course of what they should or could be.

“Sam?” Dean says uncertainly.

“Yeah,” he says, voice rough, “Yeah, this is...this is a really good idea,” Sam’s fist closes around the key and the chip and they stand quietly, together, on the sidewalk.

—

Dean trips over thin air and drops the mini-fridge as he's carrying it down a flight of stairs out to their waiting vehicles. Thankfully, it crashes onto its side on the landing, so it doesn't smash through any walls and run him into some last minute trouble with their landlord, but it hits the floor hard enough to make Dean wince and for the door to pop open and a pile of black-red bags to fall out and slither down the stairs like fish cascading down a waterfall.

Cursing, Dean glances backwards up the stairs and is relieved that it's only Benny behind him carrying a box of yarn and half-finished knitting projects, but the look on Benny's face is so immediately dark and tense that sweat prickles along Dean’s back. He looks down again, the bags sitting in a loose pile at the foot of the stairs are translucent and macabre, but strangely hilarious. Dean hurries to gather them up, stacking them in his arms and using his chin to keep them from falling.

"Imagine if one exploded or something, huh?" Dean chuckles. A literal blood bath. They'd have a hell of a time trying to explain why the stairwell looked like a murder scene.

Benny doesn't latch onto Dean's humour right away, but the tension in his mouth relaxes once Dean makes it back up the stairs to the fallen fridge and starts stuffing the bags back in. Dean stands up and wipes the nervous sweat from the side of his face, and then when he notices Benny's staring, he asks, "You okay?"

"Don’t worry about me, chief."

Dean takes a step into Benny’s bubble and puts his hand on Benny’s shoulder. The vampire almost shrugs away for a moment, but then stills. Dean says, "It's not a big deal, Benny."

"It is to me."

The mini-fridge makes it down without further incident, slotted into the pick-up truck that Rufus sold to Benny for a good price between more boxes. Most of their belongings are already packed onto the truck bed, the two of them deciding to travel light and see where the road takes them.

Sam told Dean he should tow the Impala behind so he and Benny could ride together. Dean, tempted by the prospect of a road trip with Benny, was still offended on principle and told him to shove his towline up his ass; Baby isn't luggage. They don't plan on staying nomadic for too long, anyway. Dean would prefer to find a place to settle within the month and Benny says he has a few ideas on where they could go. Sam assured Dean that he’d stay behind and call when the house sold, "So answer your damn phone." Dean rolls his eyes.

The mini-fridge becomes another logistical problem when they're loading it on, because Benny obviously can't keep his lunch in there if it's not plugged in.

"There's room in the cooler," Dean says. In the cooler that Sam insisted upon, as well. Dean’s fine with fast food and gas station munchies but Sam told Dean to do him this one favour and eat some fresh vegetables once in a while.

Benny makes a sour face, but he, too, must realize that his blood can't go bad or else they’ll be in deep shit. So, handling them like live animals, he rests them on top of Dean's salad containers without a word.

"You know, once we find a place you won't need this thing," Dean nods at the fridge once he and Benny finish loading up, leaning against the tailgate and taking a few moments to say goodbye to their home.

"Dean..."

“Benny?”

“You don’t have to try so hard to accept what I am.”

Dean motions for Benny to stand back so he can slam the tailgate closed, “I’m not trying hard,” he insists, “I’ve already accepted it, just like you’ve accepted me. I’m just trying to find ways to show you that.”

“It’s not the same. Not even close.”

“I know _that_ . But what I’m saying is I don’t think we should have to hide from each other like that anymore. If we're gonna be together, we're gonna be _together_ ," Dean says, "And that includes sharing a fucking fridge once we find a place to settle down. If that’s cool with you?"

Benny's fingers flex at his sides, eyes trained over the tailgate at the mini-fridge nestled between all of their junk. He looks away after a minute and allows a quick smile to steal over his features. Dean returns it tentatively.

"I suppose that's _cool_ with me," he says. The colloquialism so unfamiliar on his lips that Dean has to let out a good laugh before he can give a coherent reply.

"Good."

—

Dean sits alone on the cold front steps of his home. He told Benny, somewhat last minute, that he needed about a half hour alone, so Benny told Dean to find him at a local pastry shop when he was ready. He's spent fifteen minutes already watching across the street as a couple of kids chase each other around, throwing the dry, brittle leaves into the air like rain. More than once, they’ve looked his way suspiciously, speaking to each other and pointing at Dean as if he weren’t even really there, the ghost that’s been haunting the old Winchester home all these years.

That, for some reason, makes the most sense out of any theory.

Since he and Sam decided to sell the house so he move out with Benny, Dean feels cleaner, clearer, less weight on his chest when he thinks about this place and about Lawrence. Saying goodbye hasn't been difficult. When he quit his job, he told Frank he was leaving town and Frank just snorted and went back to computer to put up a hiring ad right away. He told his friends, Rufus and Bela, that he and Benny were going to set out on their own, that he and Sam were going to sell the house. Rufus told him with a wink to “be good” while Bela just demanded that Dean call at least once a week, a blotchiness appearing around her eyes that startled Dean into giving her a stiff hug.

Missouri is the last one to say goodbye to, and she's coming up the walkway, looking up at the bare tree as she passes by. Dean meets her halfway to help her up the steps to sit next to him.

“Boy, you take pleasure in surprising old women, don’t you?”

Dean smiles, sheepish, “Sorry, ma’am.”

Missouri waves away his _ma’am_ , “Don’t be _sorry_ , just remember what I told you,” she says, and makes an admonishing face when it’s apparent Dean has no idea what she’s referring to, so she adds, “ _Don’t_ be a stranger.”

Dean laughs and nods, a silent promise he means to keep. Missouri seems contented enough by it and looks out on the late autumn-dulled yard and sighs.

“Last time I let the Winchesters leave this place, I felt cold. Cold for years whenever I looked at this house. And I carried all the _what-ifs_ with me for decades. I told you before, but I shouldn’t have let your daddy leave when he did. Not that way,” she says. Dean opens his mouth to ask her, _please don’t feel guilty about that_ , and she notices him but cuts him off anyway, “This time, I don’t sense things will turn out bad for you or your brother, honey.”

A few months ago when he arrived in Lawrence, Dean wouldn’t have believed her.

After all, Missouri claimed to know the future to put her clients at ease, tell them what they wanted to hear. She admitted this to his face. But after everything, after the presence Dean felt stalking him whenever he set foot in this house, after watching Sam try to make sense of the stories he’s heard and the reality of coming home, after finding out that some things, like vampires, are real, but in curious ways that defy the myths, some things that seemed unreal before don’t feel so unreal now.

Now that he has this new start, there are still many things that Dean wants to find out, test, discover. Things about himself, about what he can do and how much he can accomplish with the life that he’s worked his ass off for.

Even if he can’t do it all, it pays off in ways to believe that he can.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did do my research on the topics presented in this fic (mainly alcoholism, child abuse, and trauma) and had my beta, whose opinions I trust and respect immensely, look things over to make sure I wasn't sticking my foot in my mouth. But, there’s always the chance that I didn’t handle something as well as I could have. That said, Dean’s inner voice is pretty vicious at times, and other characters handle situations in ways that aren't totally mindful or respectful. Their opinions do not always reflect my own or those of my beta.
> 
> My knowledge of the climate and property handling in Kansas is sketchy at best but tbh this story has actual vampires in it. So. Priorities. 
> 
> Thank you once again to everybody who had a hand in this story, and thank you all for reading it <3


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